35 Επιλογές, Για Όσους Μας Έγραψαν Ότι Μας Θέλουν Και Πάλι Στο Διαιδίκτυο! Ό,τι Λέγαμε, Διαβάστε Τα!..
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Breaking News from Newsmax.com |
Dear Reader,
You know how this Mueller investigation seem to be dragging on and on? Get this… Half of the attorneys hired by Special Counselor Robert Mueller contributed to the campaigns of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Crazy, right? You just know they’re desperately trying to find something on Trump. The Deep State is demanding it. Now if you don’t know much about America’s shadow government or Mueller’s role in it, everything is spelled out for you right here inKilling the Deep State — an explosive new bestseller from Dr. Jerome Corsi. What we learned about Mueller and his ties to the Deep State is so shocking we took a vote and decided: You have to read this for yourself. That’s why we’re giving you a FREE copy of the book. Now it sells for $30 but since we believe every American needs to know how diabolical the Deep State is and how this shadow government is controlling every insidious move in Washington…we’regiving it to you FREE. Listen, Trump is itching to fire Mueller but it’s about far more than the Russian witch hunt. Wait until you see this… Robert Mueller has an explosive past, including a trail of blood money tied directly to the Deep State. His past is so jaw-dropping we can’t even begin to tell you everything here. Read it in your FREE copy you can claim right here. Here’s a little taste of what you’ll discover in the New York Times bestseller…
Inside your FREE BOOK you’ll discover who the Deep State’s “Fab 5” are — the key players who ensure investigations into Deep State crimes go nowhere. They’re simply swept under the rug. In fact, when you read this shocking exposé, you’re going to see how this whole Russian collusion investigation is part of the Deep State’s revenge on Trump for, well, winning the election! There’s just too much to tell. Get your FREE copy here. Don’t wait —there are only a limited number of copies available. Your Friends at Newsmax P.S. This book is full of one bombshell after another. Please, we urge you to get your FREE COPY today. We reserved one in your name but we can’t hold it forever. Everyone wants to get their hands on this book that The New York Times desperately tried to keep off their bestseller list! Bill O’Reilly says the “left hates this book!” Read it and you’ll find out why.
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4. REMEMBRANCE OF RUSSIA’S PAST MEDDLING
Ignoring real Russian interventions, manufacturing fake Russian collusion.
Way back in 1919, the Russians established the Communist International, the Comintern, to control the foreign political parties they funded. As insiders explained, the Party was like the Brooklyn Bridge, “suspended by cables.” By 1924 the Russian Communists were intervening in American elections by running their own candidates.
Ben Gitlow, their candidate for vice-president in 1924 and 1928, wrote of the quest to place the world “country by country,” under the sway of the government in Moscow. William Z. Foster author of Toward Soviet America, was the Communist candidate for president in 1924, 1928, and 1932. None of these election efforts prompted a special investigation by the federal government, which had not yet recognized Communist Russia.
In 1932, Stalin deployed the world’s first man-made famine to killed millions of Ukrainians. Walter Duranty of the New York Times wrote that no such famine took place and that fake news helped the USSR gain official U.S. recognition in 1933. That opened up other possibilities for intervention.
“The curiosity is not that there were undoubtedly many Reds that made government their vocation, but that the entire Communist Party was not on the federal payroll.” That was the view of Robert Vaughn, in his PhD thesis on showbusiness blacklisting. Key players included Stalinist agents Alger Hiss in the State Department and Harry Dexter White in Treasury.
Earl Browder was the Russians’ choice for president in 1936 and 1940, and that year the Party backed the Stalin-Hitler Pact, defended the Nazi and Soviet invasion of Poland, and strove to block U.S. aid to embattled Britain. Still, the federal government launched no official investigation of Russian meddling.
In 1948 the Russian Communists backed Henry Wallace of the Progressive Party. Wallace lost to Harry Truman, who defeated Republican Thomas Dewey. Despite the Cold War escalation of the time, the U.S. federal government mounted no official investigation of the 1948 election. In 1952, the Russian Communists backed Progressive Party candidate Vincent Hallinan for president.
In 1968 the Russians returned to Communist Party candidate Charlene Mitchell, an African American who since 1946 backed the all-white, all-male dictatorship of the Soviet Union. In 1968 Mitchell touted a “revolutionary transformation of this society.” The poor people and black people, she said “must have the right to defend themselves, and that means with arms if necessary.” That call to violence, and open support for a foreign dictatorship, prompted no federal investigation.
In 1972 the Russian Communists backed old-line Stalinist Gus Hall for President of the United States. Hall was also the Russians’ candidate in 1976, 20 years after Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s massive atrocities and long after Russian invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, still under Russian control. With that record, and the campaign against dissidents such as Yuri Glazov at its height, it took a special kind of person to vote for Communist candidate Gus Hall. College student John Brennan was up to the task.
In 1979 African American Communist Angela Davis won the Lenin Peace Prize and the following year she ran for vice president on the ticket with Gus Hall. The same pair ran again in 1984, at a time when the Russians were on the march in Africa, Central America and Afghanistan. Even so, the federal government did not empower any special counsel to investigate Russian election meddling. After 1988, one Marxist site notes, “voters urged to support the Democratic Party.”
Democrat candidates were for the most part liberals until 2008. The former Barry Soetoro’s beloved “Frank” from Dreams from My Father was the Communist Frank Marshall Davis, a faithful agent of Russia’s all-white Communist dictatorship. So it made sense that early in his first term POTUS 44 canceled the European missile defense that so troubled Russia.
In 2012 POTUS 44 told Russian president Dimitry Medvedev that he would have “more flexibility” on the missile shield after the election. That open example of collusion prompted no investigation and no special counsel. That only happened after upstart Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016.
America’s own intelligence and law-enforcement agencies tasked FBI counterintelligence boss Peter Strzok to launch a “MidYear Exam” operation to clear Hillary Clinton from criminal charges. Then the deep-state axis shifted to “Crossfire Hurricane,” the Russia collusion investigation designed to discredit Trump and drive him from office.
After the president’s summit with Putin last week, John Brennan tweeted, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’ It was nothing short of treasonous.” Sen. Steny Hoyer agreed and Democrat Steve Cohen, who wanted a Purple Heart for Peter Strzok, was calling for a military coup.
This is what happens when the nation allows a Gus Hall voter to become head of the CIA. This is what happens when the nation neglects actual Russian spying and instead manufactures fake collusion. This is what happens when a president deploys the deep state to install his designated successor, all part of the fundamental transformation of America the Democrats’ candidate spoke of in 2008.
Despite revelations from Strzok and Page, that conflict rages on. As the president says, we’ll see what happens.
5. JAMIE GLAZOV’S NEW BOOK: JIHADIST PSYCHOPATH
How he is charming, seducing, and devouring us.
We are excited to announce that Frontpage Editor Jamie Glazov is delivering a new book: Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us.
Jihadist Psychopath offers an original and ground-breaking perspective on the terror war. Like no other work, it unveils the world of psychopathy and reveals, step by step, how Islamic Supremacists are duplicating the sinister methodology of psychopaths who routinely charm, seduce, capture, and devour their prey.
Jihadist Psychopath unveils how every element of the formula by which the psychopath subjugates his victim is used by the Islamic Supremacist to ensnare and subjugate non-Muslims. And in the same way that the victim of the psychopath is complicit in his own destruction, so too Western civilization is now embracing and enabling its own conquest and consumption.
President Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton says about Jihadist Psychopath:
Hard as it is to believe, many in the West simply will not take the time and trouble to understand the threat posed by radical Islamicist terrorism. James Burnham once wrote of a similar problem with international Communism in his masterful Suicide of the West. Now, Jamie Glazov has written this century’s counterpart to Burnham’s classic work and will doubtless upset those determined not to analyze for themselves the nature of the underlying phenomenon.
With a Foreword written by Michael Ledeen, advance praise also comes from Dennis Prager, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer, Steve Emerson and many other titans and scholars in the international arena. (See Amazon page for many of the blurbs).
Dennis Prager affirms that Jihadist Psychopath is “…one of the most important books of the present time.”
And that’s why you have to pre-order a copy now. Order Jihadist Psychopath Today!
Thank you!
6. OBAMA’S PAYOUT TO TERROR FINANCIERS
The Radical-in-Chief’s enabling of the enemy is exposed once again.
Islamic terrorists, whether affiliated with al Qaeda or the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, are enemies of the United States. They have American blood on their hands. The Obama administration aided and abetted these enemies by knowingly funding the terrorists and allowing them to evade the enforcement of U.S. law against them. As Andrew McCarthy once wrote, Obama was an “anti-anti-terrorist.”
For example, as the National Review has just reported, based on a discovery by the Middle East Forum, the Obama administration decided that an al Qaeda affiliate in Sudan was a worthy recipient of U.S. taxpayer funds to the tune of $200,000. The beneficiary of the Obama administration’s largesse, the Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), had been designated by the U.S. Treasury as a terrorist-financing organization a decade earlier. The Treasury Department’s designation was based on ISRA’s links to Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization, financial support for the Taliban, and fundraising in Western Europe to help finance Hamas suicide bombings.
Not only did the Obama administration disregard the U.S. Treasury Department designation. It overlooked the fact that, as set out in a July 28, 2010 press release issued by USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development), the executive director of the Islamic American Relief Agency, the U.S. branch office of ISRA, pleaded guilty to illegally transferring funds raised in the United States as purported charitable contributions to Iraq. He had “the assistance of a Sudanese man living in Jordan, who was subsequently identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as a specially designated global terrorist.” Nevertheless, four years later, USAID itself awarded a grant of $723,405 to a charity known as World Vision Inc. for the purported purpose of providing humanitarian relief in Sudan, out of which $200,000 was provided to ISRA as a sub-grantee. The money was directed “to help provide humanitarian aid, including emergency food, water, sanitation, and hygiene services, to displaced people affected by the ongoing conflict in Sudan,” according to a USAID official.
Islamic terrorist organizations cause humanitarian suffering on a grand scale, not help relieve it. Giving money to an al Qaeda affiliate to help provide humanitarian aid is like giving an arsonist the hose to help put out the fire he set.
The Obama administration’s decision to provide funding to ISRA in the face of such evidence of terrorist links was not the product of some inadvertent bureaucratic blunder. It turns out, according to the National Review report, that “government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization.” World Vision Inc. notified USAID in November 2014 of its belief that ISRA had been designated as a terrorist organization, which the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) confirmed. However, World Vision still wanted to continue working with ISRA because of its “excellent” performance. After OFAC denied World Vision a license to engage in transactions with ISRA because of the terrorist designation, World Vision appealed directly to the Obama administration’s director of USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance for help with OFAC. It wanted a new license to pay ISRA what ISRA claimed to be owed for work performed. OFAC relented, authorizing a one-time transfer of $115,000 “for services performed under the sub-award with USAID.” According to the National Review article, an unnamed World Vision official described OFAC’s decision as a “great relief as ISRA had become restive and had threatened legal action, which would have damaged our reputation and standing in Sudan.” A senior USAID official Charles Wanjue wrote to colleagues: “Good news and a great relief, really!”
In short, the Obama administration knowingly rewarded designated terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda, an avowed Islamist enemy of the United States, with taxpayer funds. Sadly, this was not an isolated incident. The Obama administration had a pattern of aiding and abetting Islamist terrorists, including those sponsored by the Iranian regime.
Indeed, former Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that some of the monies released to the Iranian regime as a result of the disastrous nuclear deal would likely end up in the hands of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which supports terrorist groups, as well as in the hands of “other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists.” Just as Kerry predicted, it turns out that at least some of the $1.7 billion ransom payment the Obama administration paid for the Iranian regime’s release of American hostages has ended up in the hands of the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah as well as with the regime’s Quds Force, which is part of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The Quds Force was designated by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2007 for providing material support to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. Flushed with cash supplied by the Obama administration, Quds’ boss Major-General Qassem Soleimani was emboldened to just threaten the United States, declaring “You know our power in the region and our capabilities in asymmetric war. We will act and we will work…We are near you, where you can’t even imagine.”
The Obama administration is also reported to have “derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States,” according to a Politico report. During the course of a multi-year operation, law enforcement agents had “followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and traced what they believed to be the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.” However, Obama’s Justice Department obstructed the investigation. It refused requests “to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force.” Once again, the Obama administration was helping the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and its terrorist proxy Hezbollah by letting them continue to enrich their coffers with the smuggling of cocaine into the United States. Moreover, the Obama administration failed to strongly press the Czech Republic to extradite a Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad the Czech Republic had arrested, who, Politico reported, was “a suspected top Hezbollah operative whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq.” Fayad was wanted on charges that included conspiring in a plan to murder U.S. government employees and to provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization. The Obama administration in effect gave cover to a Hezbollah terrorist operative who was reportedly in league with Vladimir Putin. Talk about real collusion with an enemy of the United States!
Obama did worse as president than simply try to shield Islamists from legitimate criticism that their supremacist jihadist ideology fueled violence against innocent civilians. His administration’s policies helped fund the Islamist terrorists and allowed some to escape legal accountability for their actions.
7. THE LEGITIMACY OF ISRAEL’S NATIONALITY LAW
Why it’s fair.
Upon passing the Nationality Law in Israel’s Knesset (Parliament) by a vote of 62 to 55, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to the podium and declared, “One hundred and twenty-two years after Theodore Herzl published his vision we have enshrined into the law the basic principle of our existence.” He added, “This is our country, the state of the Jews. But in recent years there have been some people who have been trying to undermine that, and by so doing, to undermine the foundations of our existence and rights. Well, today we etched into the rock of law: this is our country, this is our language, this is our national anthem, and this is our flag. Long live the state of Israel.”
Netanyahu, in defending the Nationality Bill pointed out that “When Ben Gurion declared the establishment of the state, he didn’t see the need to legislate Basic Laws to ensure its Jewish and democratic character…now there are those that challenge the state of Israel’s Jewish character…” Netanyahu’s reference had in mind Mahmoud Abbas’ refusal to recognize Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people.” Netanyahu also made the point that Israel is the only state in the Middle East that honors equal rights.
Isaac Herzog, the Opposition leader, told the plenum, that “it’s a little sad to me that the last speech I make will be against this kind of backdrop. The question is whether the law will harm or benefit Israel. History will determine. I really hope that we won’t find the fine balance between a Jewish and democratic state to be hurt.”
Yariv Levin, Israel’s Minister of Tourism, was one of the sponsors of the Nationality Law. Speaking prior to the vote, he appealed to the opposition by saying, “I ask you my friends from the Zionist Union, (a left-of-center Zionist party) to reply honestly to the question of what is in the law that you oppose. It is a law that expresses the deepest foundations of Zionism and the foundation on which the State of Israel was built. It states the obvious: The State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people,”
Arab members of the Knesset, always ready to scream “apartheid” did it vociferously, and demonstratively tore a copy of the Nationality Bill. Ayman Odeh, leader of the Arab Joint List waved a black flag. His colleague, Yousef Jabareen, said according to Irish News that the Bill was “not only discriminatory against Arabs, who make up 20 percent of Israel’s 9 million population, but racist.” They used the same mantra Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas has often used, particularly when asked to recognize Israel as the ‘nation-state of the Jewish people.’ On a visit to Cairo in July, 2013, Mahmoud Abbas, according to Reuters, declared that in the future Palestinian state he envisioned that, “In the final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli Jew, civilian or soldier on our lands.” In short, Abbas has called for a “Judenrein” Palestine.
In a new Pew Research Center analysis, more than 80 countries favor a specific religion, either as an official, government-endorsed religion or by affording preferential treatment of one religion over other faiths. Islam is the most common government-endorsed faith, with 27 countries (including most in the Middle East – North Africa region) officially enshrining Islam as their state religion. By comparison, just 13 countries, including nine European countries designate Christianity or a particular denomination as their state religion. That alone shows the hypocrisy of those criticizing Israel’s passing of the Nationality law.
In most of the Arab counties that have Islam as their government-designated religion, there are large non-Muslim minorities. In Egypt, at least 10 percent of the population is Christian (mostly Coptic). In Europe, Britain has a large Muslim presence and other minorities, but Christianity, and more specifically the Church of England or Anglicanism is the government-designated state religion. In Scotland, it is the Presbyterian Church. In Denmark, Iceland and Norway, Lutheranism is their state religion. Orthodox Christianity is the case in Greece and Armenia. In the Republic of Georgia, the constitution states: “The State shall declare absolute freedom of belief and religion. At the same time, the State shall recognize the outstanding role the Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Georgia in the history of Georgia…” In Georgia, the Orthodox Church of Georgia and the State have a concordat, or constitutional agreement that regulates the relationship between them.
In Jordan, Islam is the state religion, and converts from Islam to Christianity are questioned and scrutinized by the security forces. Non-Muslim religious groups must register to be able to own land and administer rites such as marriage. The Islamic Affairs Ministry subsidizes mosque sponsored activities, which non-Muslim religious groups do not receive.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, all laws and regulations must be based on “Islamic criteria,” and the official interpretation of sharia law. Christians and Jews are recognized religious minority groups but they are not allowed public religious expression and persuasion. Converting Muslims by Christians and Jews is punishable by death, and activities by Christians and Jews are closely monitored.
Saudi Arabia’s basic law designates Islam as the official religion, and conversion from Islam is grounds for charges of apostasy, which is punishable by death. Jews are not allowed to live permanently in the Kingdom, much less become citizens. All citizens must be Muslims. The worship of non-Muslim faiths is prohibited. One is not allowed to bring a Bible into Saudi Arabia, and non-Muslim religious meetings are forbidden, and those caught are arrested or deported.
The Pew Research forum asserted that, “In some cases, state religions have roles that are largely ceremonial. But often the distinction comes with tangible advantages in terms of legal or tax status, ownership of real estate or other property, and access to financial support from the state. In addition, countries with state-endorsed faiths tend to more severely regulate religious practice, including placing restrictions or bans on minority religious groups.” In the Arab states and the Palestinian territories, the latter condition of restrictions and bans on non-Muslims exists. In Israel, Muslim and Christian religious institutions are treated equally with their Jewish equivalent.
As usual, the Jewish state was singled out for criticism, especially in the West. To mollify its critics who considered the Law “undemocratic,” Israel removed most of the disputed provisions. The Nationality Law does not infringe on the individual rights of Arab citizens of Israel. The Jewish state has had basic laws on individual equal rights but not on a fundamental law that defined the identity and purpose of the state. Without the Nationality Law, the bedrock of Israel’s Zionist expression – the ‘Law of Return,’ would one day be considered discriminatory.
The law makes Hebrew the official language of Israel just as French is the official language of France. Yet, Arabic is guaranteed a special status in Israel. One must remember that Israel is no longer under the British Mandatory law, which proclaimed English, Arabic and Hebrew as the official languages of Palestine. Israel is an independent state of the Jewish people, whether critics like it or not.
The Nationality law is not unique to Israel. In fact, it places Israel along with other multi-ethnic and multi-lingual European nations. The only unique difference is the hypocrisy when dealing with the Jewish State.
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Dear Newsmax Reader,
He’s going for it… Moving in for the Mueller takedown. President Trump is in an all-out take-no-prisoners mode. He suggested Mueller shouldn’t be investigating this whole Russian collusion meme — and talking about who Mueller’s snuggled up with tight. Listen… Trump said something we’ve been saying all along… Robert Mueller and James Comey are besties. Thick as thieves. Do you know something? He’s right. Mueller and Comey are real players in the Deep State Theater. Look, we know exactly how they’re connected… How long they’ve been connected… Who they report to in the shadow government… Why they despise Trump… And as operatives of the Deep State, how they have what amounts to a sworn oath to take Trump out of office… One way or another. And the plans they have from their Soros-Alinsky playbook to do just that… Well, they’re insidious. There’s just way too much to tell you here, which is why we will fill you in the best way we know how… Everything you need to know, right down to the most salacious and shocking stories of unbelievable corruption and abuse of power at the highest levels… Every bit of it is revealed by Dr. Jerome Corsi in his explosive new blockbuster bestseller, Killing the Deep State. We’re giving you this political “must-read” book of the year for FREE so you’ll know exactly what’s going on. If you think you already know everything… Wait until you discover the deeper story — the one hidden behind the veil of secrecy. Everything you need to know is inside your FREE COPY of Killing the Deep State. Claim your FREE COPY right here without delay. This book was banned from the New York Times bestseller list. Let us just say… It took an army to get it on there. It did become a New York Times bestseller… Since then it has rocketed up the bestseller list on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The truths contained inside this book will shock you. Look… We’ll even share with you every page that details the Comey-Mueller bromance. Starting with… Page 8 Page 34 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 How these Deep Staters joined forces to give Sandy Berger a pass when sensitive Clinton administration documents from the National Archives… just disappeared! See the entire string of events that has unfolded into a battle between President Trump, with truth on his side… and the Deep State. Once you start it, you won’t want to put it down. Top talker Bill O’Reilly says the “left hates this book!” Bill knows the truth. And Sean Hannity said Corsi’s Killing the Deep State reveals he is ALSO a top target. Get your FREE BOOK, then hang up the “closed for lunch” sign while you read the most shocking and explosive account of the Deep State ever revealed. We don’t think anyone has ever gotten this close to the inside operation before. Once you read it, everything that’s happening today will make perfect sense. You’ll discover exactly what President Trump knows about the real Deep State actors in Washington. Claim your FREE COPY of Dr. Corsi’s Killing the Deep State right here. Yours for America, Newsmax P.S. Hey, this book would cost $30 in bookstores. But now you can get it with this incredible FREE offer and send a big message you stand with President Trump! Go Here Now
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9. TRUMP SLAPS SANCTIONS ON TURKISH OFFICIALS
Standing up for an imprisoned American pastor.
The Trump administration imposed economic sanctions on two senior officials in Turkey’s increasingly despotic regime Wednesday as retaliation for the “unfair and unjust detention” of American pastor Andrew Brunson who has been in Turkish custody since October 2016.
The repressive pro-Islamist government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses Brunson, 50, an evangelical Presbyterian minister from North Carolina who has lived in Turkey for more than 20 years, of espionage and helping terrorists, NPR reports. Specifically, Erdogan’s government has accused Brunson of aiding the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a long-running separatist insurgency. Brunson, who was in jail but is currently under house arrest, could be given a 35-year prison term if convicted on all charges. A relative who visited him said he had lost 50 pounds in jail.
“Pastor Brunson’s unjust detention and continued prosecution by Turkish officials is simply unacceptable,” Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Steven Mnuchin said. “President Trump has made it abundantly clear that the United States expects Turkey to release him immediately.”
The sanctions are aimed specifically at Turkey’s justice minister, Abdulhamit Gul, and its interior minister, Suleyman Soylu. The sanctions forbid U.S. citizens from doing business with both individuals and block any of their assets that are under U.S. jurisdiction.
Turkey is an ally of the United States through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) but relations between the two countries have been strained in recent years as Erdogan strives to transmogrify his nation into a full-blown Islamist state. Erdogan has infamously justified his drive away from secularism and toward authoritarianism by saying, “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.”
The imposition of sanctions prompted Turkish opposition party Iyi to demand the Turkish government seize the sprawling Trump Towers complex in Istanbul. (“Iyi” means good in Turkish.) But it turns out the property isn’t owned by Trump or his company. The owner is reportedly Turkish conglomerate Dogan Holding, which paid as much as $5 million to put Trump’s name on the facility.
Iyi spokesman Aytun Ciray later retracted the call after speaking to the hotel’s owners, but Trump’s name could still be removed from the property. Outraged by Trump’s claimed Islamophobia, President Erdogan previously said Trump’s name should be taken off the Trump Towers.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has had several conversations with Turkey’s foreign affairs minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, about freeing Brunson and others swept up in a security dragnet after a failed coup attempt in 2016, according to State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert. The effort to oust the Turkish autocrat is widely believed to have been staged by Erdogan himself as a means of consolidating his power.
“Turkey knows our position well,” Nauert said Wednesday. “This has gone on far too long.”
Cavusoglu’s ministry quickly promised to retaliate against the United States with “an equivalent response” if the Trump administration failed to reverse “this wrong decision.”
“There is no doubt that the decision, which disrespectfully intervenes with our judicial system, stands in contrast to the essence of our relations and will seriously damage the constructive efforts made in order to resolve problems between the two countries,” the ministry stated.
Erdogan suggested last year that his country would be willing to swap Brunson for Fethullah Gulen, an elderly Sunni imam from Turkey who lives in a guarded compound in Pennsylvania and whom Erdogan claims organized the failed 2016 coup. Gulen denies any involvement. Turkey accuses Brunson of working with Gulen’s supporters.
“You have a pastor, too,” Erdogan said in 2017. “You give us that one and we’ll work with our judiciary and give back yours.”
Gulen is often described by the mainstream media as a moderate Muslim, but Center for Security Policy Vice President for Research and Analysis Clare Lopez disputes that characterization.
Although Erdogan and Gulen have had a falling out, “they were on the same page for a long, long time, along with President Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, which is in power now in Turkey, the AKP for short, and they’ve shared the agenda for the destruction for Ataturk’s modernization program in Turkey and a turn in Turkey back to neo-Ottoman days, and an Islamist agenda.”
The two men are “at odds because they both can’t be in power,” Lopez said in 2016 on Frank Gaffney’s “Secure Freedom Radio” program. “They both can’t be on top. They’re bitter rivals for power inside of Turkey right now.”
U.S. officials aren’t keen on Erdogan’s pastor-exchange proposal and American lawmakers have joined with Trump to demand Brunson’s release.
“Our fellow citizens aren’t bargaining chips,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) said Wednesday.
“Pastor Brunson is an innocent man. Turkey’s charges are completely unjust and these new sanctions are absolutely warranted. President Erdogan ought to know that the United States expects more from a member of NATO. Free Pastor Brunson now.”
The newly unveiled sanctions were not unexpected.
On July 26, Trump took to Twitter to warn that sanctions were coming:
The United States will impose large sanctions on Turkey for their long time detainment of Pastor Andrew Brunson, a great Christian, family man and wonderful human being. He is suffering greatly. This innocent man of faith should be released immediately!
Trump has been using Twitter for months to demand Brunson’s release. On April 17 he tweeted that Brunson was “a fine gentleman” who was “on trial and being persecuted in Turkey for no reason.” On July 18 Trump again demanded Brunson’s release, saying it was a “total disgrace” that Turkey would not release this “respected U.S. Pastor” who “has been held hostage far too long.”
Give them time: Trump’s sanctions may actually succeed in bringing Brunson home.
10. ISRAELI F-16S GET IN MIDDLE OF BITTER SERBIAN-CROATIAN DISPUTEBelgrade “deeply disappointed” at Israeli participation in celebratory flyover.
“Israel and the Jewish people have had a difficult past and should understand the difficulties and sufferings of other nations,” Stanojevic said in an interview.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said Saturday that “Hitler wanted a world without Jews; Croatia and its policy wanted a Croatia without Serbs.” Croatia ceded from the former Yugoslavia in 1991, and fought a four year war for independence, with “Operation Storm,” which Sunday’s flyover commemorated, being the final battle of that war.
Stanojevic said that Serbia learned about the planned participation of the Israeli jets on Thursday, and Belgrade’s efforts over the weekend to reach Israeli political and military officials to prevent the Israeli involvement in the commemoration failed.
“Usually, other countries do not participate in this event because of the sensitivity of the issue and the different opinions about the historic events,” he said. “For us, Israel is a very friendly country, so it was surprising to see the active participation of two flights in the military exhibition over the historic Serbian town of Knin, that is now empty. This is a deeply disappointing gesture for us.”
A US military envoy also took part in the ceremonies. ‘
The Foreign Ministry had no response and directed inquires to the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, which, despite numerous calls, did not respond.
Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of the center’s Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs, said that Israel’s participation in the event was “unimaginable.”
“Why would Israel take sides in Balkan wars?” he asked. “Both countries have very good relations with Israel; there is a great deal of admiration for Israel in both capitals.”
Zuroff said that “both sides committed war crimes, and to participate in an event that is basically honoring a victory that led to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, is not a good idea – it does not make any sense.”
Three Israeli Air Force F-16 Barak fighter jets landed at Croatia’s 91st air base in Pleso on August 2 and were inspected by Croatia’s Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Damir Krsticevic and chief of general staff of the Croatian Armed Forces Gen. Mirko Sundov.
According to reports, the jets were in Croatia as part of a demonstration tour pending Israel’s sale of 12 F-16s to the European country, to be delivered by 2020 to replace their fleet of 12 Soviet-designed Mikoyan MiG-21.
Croatia officially chose the Israeli jets on March 29 in a deal worth close to $500 million, and according to local press, the 12 F-16C/D Barak jets will be called Flash and Storm after the two Croatian military operations against Serbia in 1995.
Prior to the celebratory flight, Croatian Air Force squadron commander Christian Jagodic and the commander of Israel’s Ramat David Airbase conducted a joint flight in Croatia’s MiG-21 fighter jets.
“After our pilot Zeljko Ninic flew an F-16 in Israel, we have had the opportunity to see an Israeli pilot fly an MiG-21,” Total Croatia news site quoted Krsticevic as saying. “That is confirmation of our strategic partnership and friendship with Israel. I am pleased that in the period to come our pilots will have the opportunity to learn from the best, and they are Israeli pilots.”
Maj. G to lead Israel Air Force’s 122 Air Intelligence Squadron
Maj. G finished a command course last month. With her promotion to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, she will replace the current commander of the squadron in the coming months.
“I’m happy about the appointment,” said Maj. G. in a statement from the military. “It is a great privilege along with a great responsibility. The true work is still ahead. I am proud to serve in the air force.”
Last year, a senior IAF officer told The Jerusalem Post that a female IAF squadron commander was not far off.
He explained that the number of women requesting to serve in combat units – including in the air force – had steadily increased since 2000 and that the military was “now seeing the fruits of that.”
In 2014, a woman was named deputy commander of an operational squadron. While women have served as deputy commanders of support squadrons, the promotion of that woman made her the highest ranking woman in the IAF at the time.
In January, Norkin appointed the first woman to command an aviation squadron.
Major T. was promoted to lieutenant-colonel to head a squadron of IAF transport planes.
Another woman, Maj. M, was appointed to command the IAF’s operational command and control unit and was promoted to lieutenant-colonel. According to the army statement, she will become the first female air traffic controller to reach that rank.
In November, a woman was appointed deputy commander of a combat squadron. The officer, Capt. Y, an F-15 navigator, will serve in the Spearhead Squadron, which flies F-15 fighter jets out of Tel Nof Airbase in central Israel.
Two other female officers were appointed to serve as deputy commanders of a squadron of UAVs, or drones, out of Palmahim Airbase.
In 1949, Israel’s army became the first in the world to introduce mandatory military service for both men and women, and in 1951, Yael Rom became the first graduate of the prestigious pilot course. But shortly after, women were barred from combat positions, including blocked from becoming pilots.
In 1993, South African immigrant Alice Miller successfully sued the military for her right to enlist in the IAF. While she was declared medically unfit for the role of pilot, her actions shattered the IAF’s glass ceiling and opened the pilot course to women.
Five years later, Sheri Rahat graduated from the pilot course and became a navigator for the F-16 fighter jet. In 2000, Lt. Roni Zuckerman, the granddaughter of two leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, became the first woman to graduate as a combat fighter pilot.
Despite encouraging women to enlist since the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Miller in 1995, only 49 have completed the course.
According to the IAF, of the approximately 600 cadets who passed the preliminary tests for the prestigious course, about two thirds dropped out in the first year of the three-year intensive training and only 30-40 of those who stayed successfully completed the course.
Trump Derangement Syndrome branches out into new pathologies.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Having suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome for two years, those disaffected Republican NeverTrumpers have developed a verbal tic. Whatever the topic, they can’t resist taking a few shots at Trump that are usually irrelevant to whatever point they are making. They are seemingly unaware that in doing so they function as Fifth Columnists for the progressives, at the same time they repeatedly demonstrate the entitled arrogance of the entrenched elite that Trump successfully ran against, and that they continue to deny exists.
Here’s an example from NRO’s Jonah Goldberg in a column contrasting John McCain and Donald Trump. And not surprisingly, considering Goldberg’s persistent animus against Trump, the comparison is invidious. You know what’s coming when Goldberg gratuitously contrasts McCain’s captivity in Hanoi with Trump’s five draft deferments. Of course, a splendid service record and medals for bravery are admirable, but not necessarily guarantees of political wisdom. They are achievements deserving of honor, but they don’t exempt a mediocre politician from criticism. Goldberg’s contrast is merely a species of ad hominem attack.
Goldberg uses this fallacy as a lead-in to another simplistic contrast: between “the forces of democracy and the forces of nationalism,” a struggle the nationalists, as he defines them, are winning. Again, this is an either-or fallacy rooted in choosing one dimension of some nationalisms, such as Russia’s, and then proclaiming via another begged question that Donald Trump embodies it. Goldberg finishes with an even more egregious begged question: “Trump defines national interest in almost autocratic terms,” hinting at the preposterous smear that Trump is some sort of inchoate Adolph Hitler.
Goldberg knows better. He wrote Liberal Fascism, a book about the totalitarian and fascist roots of modern progressivism. He knows that fascism never got as close to the levers of American power as communism did during the Roosevelt administration, or obtained the still active influence of collectivism in the schools, universities, and popular culture. How else would socialism––communism lite––be so popular now? Where can we find anywhere in the U.S. openly fascist organizations, or candidates for public office, or a Republican faction all plumping for fascism the way Bernie Sanders and other mainstream Democrats today are championing socialism?
This claim of incipient “autocracy” is based on NeverTrumper’s dubious interpretations of Trump’s rhetoric, such as “Make America Great Again,” a slogan also used by Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton without drawing dark comparisons to the short-lived isolationist movement before World War II. Worse, like the whole NeverTrump clan, Goldberg ignores what Trump has done while obsessing over his indecorous or “unpresidential” words. The charge that Trump is “forgiving or even admiring of foreign despotism” of course refers to the pearl-clutching over Trump’s occasional positive comments about Vladimir Putin, most recently in Helsinki. But what has Trump done that has materially benefitted Putin?
On the contrary, as this copious list of Trump’s achievements documents, Trump has been much tougher on Russia than were Obama and his “reset,” or George W. Bush and his “looking” Putin “in the eye” to “get a sense of his soul.” I don’t recall much Republican hysteria about Bush’s “admiring foreign despotism.” And when it came to benefitting Putin, it was Obama who courted him with sotto voce promises of “flexibility,” a vow he fulfilled by abandoning the planned anti-missile installations in Poland and Czechoslovakia.
And when Obama did “get tough” with Vlad, he issued childish empty warnings and threats like “cut it out” because “we can do stuff” to Russia in retaliation for its cyber meddling in our elections. But as we know, Obama haughtily dismissed Russian electoral meddling as hysteria, and discounted publicly taking Putin to task as “thump[ing] our chests about a bunch of stuff,” and then followed up by doing nothing about the evidence he had been given of Russia’s interference.
So when it comes to Putin, Trump’s talk is nice but his acts are tough, while Obama’s talk was tough but his acts nice. Yet Trump is the “admirer of despotism.”
As I wrote in July, NeverTrumpers didn’t spend a fraction of their rhetorical dudgeon on Obama’s appeasement as they have spent on Trump’s careless words. So it’s hard to take seriously Goldberg’s claim that McCain “loathed” Putin but Trump “gushes” over him. Take McCain’s response to Obama’s appeasing deeds: cancelling the anti-missile plans was “seriously misguided,” he said in flabby diplo-speak. Contrast that with McCain’s scorched-earth criticism of Trump’s words in Helsinki: “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate.” On the contrary, it’s very easy to calculate: based on Trump’s tough actions on Russia, the damage is nil.
The same NeverTrump tic is repeated in this contrast: “Their [McCain’s and Trump’s] personal differences are indeed profound, underlining the decline in ‘old-fashioned’ notions of duty, honor and character, and the new emphasis on personal celebrity and ‘winning’ on your own terms.” Seriously, who believes an “emphasis on personal celebrity and winning” are “new” in American politics?
Indeed, much of the dislike of McCain as a politician was the perception he created, and reveled in, of being a celebrated “maverick,” which many voters took to mean breaking with conservative principle to the delight of the same Democrats now gushing over the same McCain they savaged in the 2008 presidential election. Indeed, McCain’s stature was in direct proportion to his attacks on Trump––like, for example, McCain’s casting the deciding “no” vote in 2017 for the “skinny repeal” of the disastrous progressive Rube Goldberg machine that is Obamacare. To many people, that vote looked like a farewell finger in the eye of Donald Trump for slighting McCain.
So what kind of “character” did that display? Or where was the “honor” in banishing Sarah Palin, who energized McCain’s presidential campaign, from his funeral? And what conservative “duty” did McCain fulfill when he called Ted Cruz a “wacko-bird,” or said that Trump “fired up the crazies”? Or when he called a wheel-chair bound critic of McCain-Feingold “corrupt”?
Understand, I’m not complaining about such blunt rhetoric from either party, since it has been a staple of democracy since Aristophanes accused Athenian politicians of being homosexual prostitutes and venal traitors. What’s at issue is the attempt to marginalize Trump as a dangerous anomaly based mainly on his rhetoric of a sort that is hardly unique in American political history, at the same time his achievements so far, as Bobby Jindalrecently catalogued, have expressed conservative principles in action.
Finally, Goldberg’s contrast between McCain’s “duty,” “honor,” and “character” with Trump’s “celebrity” and “winning” is weakened by Goldberg himself in a subsequent column: the “profound” differences between the two, he writes, “originate from an important similarity. I am honestly not sure what word best describes it: Vanity? Ego? Pride?” Speaking of McCain’s obsession with campaign finance reform, one that led him to co-sponsor the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold bill, Goldberg writes, “Finance reform was born of a certain kind of old-fashioned vanity that ranked personal honor higher than the mere facts or abstract principle.” Goldberg goes on to imply that McCain’s “heroic narrative” of himself as a “maverick” battling evildoers can compromise governing: “The problem is that not every public-policy issue fits neatly into a good-vs.-evil framework, and McCain sometimes allowed himself a definition of heroism that won praise from the crowd that always celebrates when a conservative confirms liberal prejudices.”
That’s a pretty good catalogue of why many conservatives who admired McCain’s courage and self-sacrifice as a POW were disappointed with his conduct as a Republican Senator.
And a presidential candidate. Goldberg doesn’t mention the prime example of McCain’s ego and vanity and concern for his reputation: his pusillanimous presidential campaign in which his fear of being seen as a low-brow “racist” made him go easy on Obama. McCain didn’t seem to understand that more important than the race commissars’ approval or his own high-minded self-image was the obligation to remind voters of Obama’s biographical lacunae and unsavory connections with extremists like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright. Such exposure needed to be continually put before the voters in order to uncover the reality behind Obama’s duplicitous “no red state, no blue state” rhetoric: his progressive aim to “fundamentally transform America.”
How does handing the presidency to the most progressive member of the Senate support Goldberg’s claim that McCain “subordinated himself to the needs of his country”? And what effects of Trump’s outlandish hyperbole and insult have been as dire for this country as Obama’s eight years of progressive misrule?
In the end, NeverTrumpers need to drop the reflexive ad hominem attacks and displays of wounded class pride evident at McCain’s funeral. They should argue how a President Hillary Clinton would have done better than Trump. Clinton is a corrupt careerist and manifest felon who would have continued Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of our country by further fattening the bloated progressive regime of redistribution, regulation, entitlements, identity politics pandering, encroachments into citizen and civil society autonomy, and subversion of the Constitution. And abroad she would have strengthened America’s subordination to the aims and values of Davos Man, that denizen and beneficiary of the “rules-based international order.” How possibly could Clinton have done better for America’s citizens at home, and America’s interests and security abroad?
Perhaps NeverTrump Republicans stick with peevish complaints about Trump’s style because they know that making a legitimate case for a President Hillary is as impossible as making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
Absent that argument, the NeverTrumpers and their reflexive hatred of Trump appear to ordinary people as the bitter resentment of the Acela corridor elite who have come to believe that they–– and not the sovereign people in all their riotous diversity of manners, passions, and interests, and their stubborn preference for freedom and autonomy–– are entitled to run the show. Call it populism, nationalism, or whatever you want, but it’s still a force to reckon with rather than insult.
13. FBI FINDS FAKE REFUGEE — AND ISIS KILLER
Another ticking time bomb taken off the streets.
The FBI Joint Terrorism Taskforce last week arrested Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, 45, an accused ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorist who lied about his background to gain entry to the United States.
The Iraqi national, a DOJ statement explains, “participated in various activities in support of those terrorist organizations, including helping to plant improvised explosive devices, and committing the murder that is the subject of the extradition request. Ameen concealed his membership in those terrorist groups when he applied for refugee status, and later when he applied for a green card in the United States.”
According to the statement, after the town of Rawah fell to the Islamic State on June 21, 2014, “Ameen entered the town with a caravan of ISIS vehicles and drove to the house of the victim, who had served as an officer in the Rawah Police Department. On the evening of June 22, 2014, after the caravan arrived at the victim’s house, Ameen and other members of the convoy allegedly opened fire on the victim. Ameen then allegedly fired his weapon at the victim while the victim was on the ground, killing him.”
Iraq seeks the extradition of Ameen, who had been living comfortably in Sacramento, California, taking college classes and working an at auto body shop. The FBI has information that Ameen had been a member of al Qaeda and ISIS since 2004, and that his family helped found al Qaeda in Iraq. According to witnesses, the Ameen home served as a headquarters for ISIS in Rawah. In a 2006 attack on Iraqi army headquarters in the Al Karabilah area, the government charges, Ameen took soldiers as prisoners and executed them.
As the Sacramento Bee reported, Ameen “arrived in Turkey in April 2012 to begin the process of seeking asylum, and lied about his background, claiming his father had been killed because he had cooperated with U.S. forces.” According to court documents his father died in 2010 from a cerebral clot.
In June, 2014 Ameen gained approval to come to the United States as a refugee but returned to Iraq many times. In January 2015 he drove a truck for a thrift store in Salt Lake City. When he came to Sacramento in May, 2016, he “repeatedly lied about his past, saying he had never killed anyone, used weapons against people or belonged to violent groups.” Locals had no clue about Ameen’s background and some were skeptical about the arrest.
“There is a lot of conflicting information in which it’s sometimes difficult to ascertain immediately who a person is.” That was law professor Omar Dajani, a former negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, and who served with the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.
POTUS 44 told the nation refugees were accepted “only after subjecting them to rigorous screening and security checks,” with “biometrics” and such, but United Nations and U.S. officials apparently accepted Omar Ameen’s story without question. “Everyone would agree that this is a failure of the system to let this happen,” defense attorney Mark Reichel told Fox News, “and that with his background, Ameen should never have been admitted to the United States as a refugee.”
“We’ve admitted tens of thousands with no effective screening plan,” candidate Donald Trump warned during the 2016 election campaign. “We have no idea who we are letting in.” Omar Ameen got in, and after his arrest California governor Jerry Brown, a three-time contender for president of the United States, responded in curious fashion.
In 2015, after Islamic terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 in San Bernardino, Brown warned that “people who are committed to the jihadist doctrine are going to be killing people in very unexpected places.” And the California Democrat pledged to spend more time “making sure that our federal-state collaboration really is working.”
Despite that claim, the arrest of Omar Ameen prompted no statement from Brown hailing the FBI Joint Terrorism Taskforce or warning about the dangers of fake refugees committed to jihadist doctrine. Brown and his attorney general Xavier Becerra, once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as a running mate, support sanctuary state laws that protect even violent criminals from deportation. Two days after the arrest of Ameen, governor Brown made a move that might be considered a response.
On Friday, the Sacramento Bee reported, Brown “pardoned three Cambodian refugees facing deportation by federal immigration authorities,” Vanna In, Heng Lao and Phal Sok, all natives of Cambodia, came to the United States legally, as refugees. Vanna In, who murdered a rival gang member, was already under deportation orders and for the three refugees, Brown’s pardon “will help them avoid that fate.” In 2017 Brown issued three pardons to former convicts who had already been deported to Mexico.
Meanwhile, Omar Ameen is being held as a flight risk and danger to the community and on Monday he faces a hearing in Sacramento. Several ISIS radicals have recently been sentenced to prison terms in California and in 2015 FBI director James Comey said “those people exist in every state.”
14. HASINA AND ERDOGAN: TWO ANTI-ISRAEL BIRDS OF A FEATHER
The ties of tyranny and hate that bind.
There are numerous uncanny parallels between Erdogan and Sheikh Hasina, two democratically elected dictators who are hostile towards the State of Israel.
According to Plato, “Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy.” Indeed, whether we are speaking about Adolph Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini or Hamas in Gaza, each of these tyrannical regimes originally was democratically elected before unleashing their dictatorial horrors. As the days go by, this also appears to be the case with both Erdogan’s government in Turkey and Sheikh Hasina’s government in Bangladesh, who are both dictators that were democratically elected and have demonstrated hostility towards Israel as well as America.
While Erdogan initially rose to power democratically, in recent times, there have been reports that he has managed to stay in power via suppressing the media, arresting critics and engaging in massive voter fraud. Turkish Jewish dissident Rafael Sadi proclaimed that Erdogan has ruthlessly repressed critics, jailing thousands of journalists. Indeed, in recent times, the jailing of an American pastor that caused intensive diplomatic problems for Turkey with the US and the crashing of the Turkish lira is merely the tip of the iceberg regarding Erdogan’s persecution of those opposed to his dictatorial rule. Other victims include Gulenists, secular Turkish military officers, Alevis, Kurds, etc. According to Sadi, aside from persecuting those opposed to him and being vocally opposed to the US administration, Erdogan has managed to stay in power by spreading hatred against Israel, even though Israel and Turkey have $6 billion worth of trade, Israel purchases Kurdish oil via Turkey and the Haifa port renovation is being done via a Turkish company: “Israel is the friendliest partner of Erdogan. With Israel hatred and hostility, he can get at least 50% of the votes.”
Erdogan has a long record of promoting hatred against Israel. Not too long ago, he proclaimed: “The spirit of Hitler is apparent in some Israeli officials.” Furthermore, when the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital city, Erdogan declared: “Those who think that they are the owners of Jerusalem today will not even be able to find a tree to hide behind tomorrow.” Erdogan was referencing a Hadith of the Prophet Muhammed: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” In fact, in the 1980’s, Erdogan even wrote, directed and played the leading role in an anti-Semitic play called: “Freemasons, Communists, Jews.”
Statements like this have the effect of spreading anti-Semitism within Turkey. According to Turkish journalist Uzay Bulut, when Turkey entered into the Kurdish held city of Afrin in Syria, Turkish social media compared the Kurdish fighters there to “servants of Jews,” “bastards of Jews,” “underbred Armenians and Jews,” “Crypto-Jews, Armenians and Greeks,” and other derogatory anti-Semitic statements. According to Arutz Sheva, one even had the audacity to assert: “Allah willing, Hans, Georges, and Jewish and Armenian dogs will be cleansed from the area.” Furthermore, after Israel implemented new security measures following the murder of a Druze body guard, dozens of Turkish assailants attacked the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Turkey, throwing rocks at the synagogue, kicking its doors and threatening worshippers.
Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh has a similar background. Like Erdogan, she was also democratically elected initially but following the 2014 sham elections, she lost her democratic legitimacy. Ever since, she has managed to stay in power by repressing critics, persecuting minorities and of course, engaging in anti-Israel rhetoric. She has condemned Trump for moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and accused Israel of engaging in massive human rights violations along the Gaza border. In addition, Bangladesh has no diplomatic relations with Israel and Sheikh Hasina is opposed to them happening until the Palestinians obtain independence.
However, Sheikh Hasina is known for persecuting the Hindu minority within her country, suffered a huge set-back in relations with the US after the car of a US envoy was attacked and students started to protest en masse against her government and yet, she still has very warm relations with Erdogan. Indeed, when Recep Tayyip Erdogan was reelected not too long ago after massive voter fraud, Sheikh Hasina gave 100 kilograms worth of mangos as a gift to the sultan-in-chief and she has coordinated some of her anti-Israel positions with Erdogan’s government.
How should people respond to these two democrats turned despots? The best way to respond is to go on the aggressive and to call both dictators out on the human rights abuses that they commit against their own people. After all, although two anti-Israel despotic birds of a feather stick together, the voices of the oppressed and the downtrodden continue to rise up together against the yoke of tyranny and they will gladly be the West’s allies.
Rachel Avraham is the President of the Dona Gracia Mendes Nasi Center for Human Rights in Middle East (under formation) and is a political analyst at the Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Research and Public Relations. She is the author of “Women and Jihad: Debating Palestinian Female Suicide Bombings in the American, Israeli and Arab Media.”
15. OPERATION FINALE
Cinéma vérité for the “final solution.”
Back in 1986, “Firing Line” host William F. Buckley asked former New York Times Moscow correspondent Harrison Salisbury which was worse, Stalin’s forced famine in Ukraine or Hitler’s mass murder of Jews? As Salisbury knew, the Times’ Walter Duranty, who wrote that no famine took place, privately conceded that as many as 10 million may have perished in Ukraine. Even so, Salisbury said that the Nazis were worse because they had attempted to wipe an entire people off the face of the earth. That “final solution” is the back story to Operation Finale, which opened in American theaters Wednesday.
The German National Socialist Reich that was supposed to last a thousand years fell after little more than a decade and in the chaotic final days many prominent Nazis were able to escape the Allies and slip away. In 1950, Adolf Eichmann made his way to Argentina where he lived under the name of Ricardo Klement, issued by the Italian delegation of the Red Cross in Geneva.
He lives quietly in bustling Buenos Aires but local Jews learn that Klement, who works at a Mercedes-Benz factory, is really Eichmann. Word quickly gets back to Israel, but the Mossad is skeptical. As the film shows, the vaunted intelligence agency has been known to slip up and, as one character says, “kill the wrong Nazi.”
Eichmann is lured outside his home, secretly photographed and positively identified. Even in Argentina it would be easy to assassinate him but Israel wants to capture the Nazi fugitive and put him on trial, so the world will know the truth. So on one level, Operation Finale is the ultimate heist movie, with a difference. As Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (Simon Russell Beale) tells the secret agents, history is in their hand and they must not fail.
Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac) heads up the operation, and he has a special motive because the Nazis murdered his sister Fruma. Yet, of all the agents who lost loved ones in the Holocaust, he takes the most relaxed approach. Malkin’s former flame Hanna Elian (Mélanie Laurent) will be charged with sedating the Nazi for the trip back. The film rushes through the preparations but viewers will get a sense of spy craft circa 1960, long before personal computers and the internet, with false passports, safe houses and the like. No James Bond characters in this film.
Eichmann is a “human metronome” on his daily routine but his capture will be tricky. If the film rushes through the kidnap plot, viewers quickly understand the reason. The plan had been to whisk him out of the country but the departure is delayed ten days. So viewers get to see a lot of the Nazi.
With his famous 1982 performance as Gandhi, one might think Ben Kingsley would work best as one of the Nazi hunters. Here he plays Eichmann his own self, and viewers will be hard pressed to think of anyone who could turn in a more convincing performance.
In his interactions with captors, the core of Operation Finale, Eichmann goes through stages of denial and confession. He was just a cog in a machine, only following orders, and so forth. Kingsley manages to convey what Hannah Arendt, who covered Eichmann’s trial for the New Yorker, called the “banality of evil,” cold bureaucratic machinery deployed to take millions of lives. But viewers will have no doubt that Eichmann was an evil man.
“The problem here is with a human being, not with a monster, not with an animal,” the real Peter Malkin once explained. “The human being does things that even the monster does not do, because the human is more sophisticated. The problem is not how the monster did it, but how the human being did it.”
The Israeli agents get Eichmann out of Argentina disguised as an El Al crew member. The film omits the huge diplomatic uproar this caused, but no great loss. The Israelis put Eichmann on trial and viewers see plenty of evidence about the six million back stories. Harrison Salisbury knew of what he spoke in 1986.
As the film notes, and as this writer recalls, the trial was televised around the world. Viewers see photos of Eichmann on the stand, and the resemblance with the film character is startling. Critics are certain to nit-pick some details, and perhaps some minor performances, but overall this is cinéma vérité at the highest level and a primer for millennials.
It is a matter of historical fact that Adolf Eichmann, in charge of the “final solution,” was hanged on June 1, 1962. As Ben Kingsley said in his role as Gandhi, “Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”
16. NATO’s Kosovo Force protects World Heritage site
It’s long overdue.
About four years ago, in August 2014, ISIS began slaughtering the Yezidis in Iraq and committed a genocide against this ancient community, massacring over 5,000, abducting 7,450 women and girls who were then sold into sexual slavery and driving over 500,000 out of their ancestral homes. Although the Yezidi genocide has received widespread international recognition due to the indisputable evidence that has been presented including the existence of mass graves, witness testimonies and ISIS publications online inciting against Yezidis and documenting massacres of them, four years on, the Yezidis have not yet received justice for the horrific atrocities that were committed against them. The question remains, why is this the case and when will there be justice for the Yezidi people?
In Iraq and Syria, where the crimes of the Yezidi genocide were perpetrated, it is unlikely that the Yezidi victims will get justice. In Syria, rebels allied with Turkey have destroyed Yezidi holy sites and forcefully converted Yezidis in Afrin to Islam. There are also reports of Yezidis being forced to wear the hijab in these areas. So far, Turkey’s allies have been able to act against the Yezidis in Afrin with impunity, without any interference from the outside world.
Unfortunately, the Syrian regime is part of the problem rather than the solution when it comes to putting an end to radical Islamism within Syria. They are an ally of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who systematically oppresses women and minorities both within their own country and in countries that fall under their influence due to the creation of a radical Shia Crescent from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. Furthermore, according to local sources within Syria, while the Kurdish authorities that liberated areas from the yoke of ISIS are attempting to promote women’s rights in those areas today, the Syrian regime has not followed suite in the areas that they control, doing virtually nothing to advance the status of women and minorities within the country. If anything, the plight of women and minorities under Assad’s control is one step above the plight of women and minorities under the control of ISIS and other radical Islamist groups. This works to worsen the plight of Yezidis in Syria.
Unfortunately, Yezidis in Iraq have not really fared much better. According to Human Rights Watch, in Iraq, trials of ISIS terrorists have been fundamentally flawed with numerous due process violations. Although the Iraqi government does offer financial compensation for every Yezidi victim released from ISIS captivity and recently converted a Kocho school, which was the site of many atrocities against the Yezidis, into a museum commemorating the Yezidi genocide, Yezidi leader Sheikh Mirza Ismail reiterated that Yezidis living on Mount Shingal still are not given the opportunity to return to their homes and to rebuild their lives.
“Yezidis in Mount Shingal still have no basic human services such as hospitals, schools, jobs, clean drinking water, food and most importantly, safety and security,” he proclaimed. “The displaced Yezidis in KRG cannot go back to Shingal because most of their homes were destroyed by ISIS. Most of the Yezidi villages on the southern side of the mountain are still booby-trapped with explosives. The present plight of the Yezidi people in the Middle East is worse than you can imagine especially in Iraq and Syria while the Yezidis in Iran and Turkey have been mostly annihilated by the regimes in both countries.”
The lack of security experienced recently by the Yezidis in Mount Shingal was highlighted when a Turkish airstrike killed several people soon after a ceremony commemorating the Yezidi genocide in Kocho. According to Ismail, “The Turkish airstrikes destroyed three cars and killed several Yezidis including Mam Zaki, whom the Turkish government accused of being a PKK member. Zaki was a Yezidi from Turkey and came to Shingal in order to fight against ISIS. OK, let us say that Zaki was PKK. How about the other Yezidis? There are thousands of armed PKK militias in Qamishli, Hassakeh and other areas in Syria. Why are the Turkish airstrikes only against the Yezidi regions in Shingal and Afrin? No, Turkey is not after the PKK. The regime of Erdogan the dictator is following in the Ottoman’s footsteps in order to destroy the indigenous Yezidis.”
Unfortunately, the international community has not been able to help the Yezidis either. In instances where the authorities in the home country cannot rely upon the local government to address massive human rights abuses in a fair manner, usually the victims have the option of turning to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. But unfortunately for the Yezidis, neither Syria nor Iraq are parties to the Rome Statute, which according to international law means that their case cannot be brought in front of the International Criminal Court at The Hague unless the UN Security Council Mandates that it should be done. Unfortunately for the Yezidis, neither Russia nor China are likely to permit the UN Security Council to mandate that the Yezidi genocide case be brought before the International Criminal Court at The Hague. This brings the Yezidis back to square one when seeking justice for the genocide that they survived.
“The Yezidi people have faced 74 genocides by Muslims because the Yezidis do not want to change the faith that was given to us by God,” Ismail proclaimed. “How can the Yezidis receive justice when the makers of international law do not have respect for the international law that they wrote? The benefits of international law and human rights do not apply to all peoples in the world. Those two types of important benefits apply to some nations to get what they deserve and those two types of benefits are also abused by its own creators in order to destroy some nations such as the Yezidis, Zoroastrians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, etc. If the UN and five permanent Security Council members wanted to free 3,000 Yezidi women, who are still enslaved in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Muslim countries, they could press those countries and order them to hand over the Yezidi women and children. Hundreds of young Yezidi women and children were transferred to Turkey alone from Syria by ISIS while ISIS is losing control in Syria.”
Given the obstacles Yezidis face in getting the international community to assist them, some Yezidi victims have turned to German courts in order to obtain justice. However, this is a poor substitute for the Hague. There cannot be comprehensive justice for all victims of the Yezidi genocide without action being taken by the UN Security Council on this matter. But unfortunately, power politics is preventing the implementation of justice for victims of the Yezidi genocide. Given this horrific reality, while the Yezidi people are constantly striving to obtain justice, when they will actually be able to obtain justice despite these obstacles remains an open question mark.
Rachel Avraham is the President of the Dona Gracia Mendes Nasi Center for Human Rights in Middle East (under formation). She is also a political analyst at the Safadi Center for International Diplomacy, Research and Public Relations and is a contributing writer at the Haym Salomon Center. Avraham is the author of “Women and Jihad: Debating Palestinian Female Suicide Bombings in the American, Israeli and Arab Media.”
18. SMOKING GUN MEMO LAID OUT LEFT’S ASSAULT ON CONSERVATIVES
While President Trump was being inaugurated, the Soros-funded Left was busy agitating.
[To learn more about the Freedom Center’s recent victory over the Left’s censorship attempt, and its call for a coalition across party and ideological lines to defend free speech, click here.]
A strategy memo compiled by George Soros-funded activist groups as President Trump was being inaugurated last year foretold and seemed to lay the groundwork for many of the political difficulties Trump now faces and the politics-related strife now roiling the nation.
The memo takes on a heightened importance as the politically-driven censorship of conservatives by the gigantic, unregulated social media corporations controlled by the Left is moving into high gear while the crucial midterm congressional elections of Nov. 6 approach.
The intensely anti-conservative animus in the memo may have inspired MasterCard and WorldPay’s attempt on Aug. 21 to strangle the fundraising efforts of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, publisher of FrontPage, by refusing to complete its financial transactions. On that day MasterCard informed the Freedom Center that it would no longer process its transactions because it had been labeled a “hate group” by the radical leftist groups known as the Southern Poverty Law Center and ColorOfChange.org. The Freedom Center stood falsely accused of being “hateful in nature” and “advocating for violence.”
Only a massive outcry by conservative groups and prominent conservatives like Rush Limbaugh forced MasterCard to back down days later and restore the Freedom Center’s online fundraising facilities. But other conservative websites haven’t been so lucky. Many have been shut down or seen their traffic slashed as leftists have manipulated algorithms and limited the reach of conservative content.
The David Horowitz Freedom Center has since called for a coalition to be created across partisan and ideological lines to defend free speech.
The memo itself, “Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action,” marked an escalation in tactics by the Left. It was first made public last year by Joe Schoffstall of the Washington Free Beacon around the time Donald Trump took the oath of office to become the nation’s 45th president. This smoking-gun planning document aimed at suppressing conservative voices on social media was ignored by the mainstream media at the time and in the more than a year-and-a-half since.
The document spelled out the Left’s plans for impeaching President Trump, filing lawsuits against the fledgling administration, and using social media to delegitimize Trump’s presidency and hurt Republicans. “Right now, our institutions are among the critical few that stand between the America we love and the abyss,” the memo stated. “We must protect and defend our democratic values. We will not back down. We will only move forward.”
WND founder Joseph Farah referred last week to the 49-page memo as a blueprint “revealing how George Soros operatives, including David Brock, were there at the genesis, the planning stages, with their hands on the ignition key, of the most concerted, well-funded, diabolical attack on free speech in the history of America.”
The document “was nothing short of a plan to turn Google, Facebook and other social media into hyper-partisan Democratic Party activists, promoters, cheerleaders, and off-the-books donors in an effort to turn the country into a one-party state.”
The memo outlined left-wing activist David Brock’s four-year plan to undermine the Trump administration and Republicans using Media Matters for America (MMfA), American Bridge 21st Century, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and left-wing propaganda website Shareblue. All four organizations were either founded by Brock or are now controlled by him. Since 2008, leftist billionaire George Soros has given more than $1.5 million to MMfA and more than $1.1 million to CREW through his philanthropies.
Brock, who reportedly raised $65 million during the 2016 election cycle, began working on his plan more or less immediately after Republican Donald Trump unexpectedly trounced Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election in November 2016.
Brock and his comrades met in Palm Beach, Fla., as Trump assumed the presidency and Trump-hating Antifa rioted in the streets of the nation’s capital. “What better way to spend inaugural weekend than talking about how to kick Donald Trump’s ass?” Brock said in an email to left-wing mega-donors including Soros and Tom Steyer.
Whether Brock can take responsibility for all the leftist-inspired turmoil in the country is debatable, but many of the goals identified in the memo have already come to pass.
According to the memo, MMfA “will continue its core mission of disarming right-wing information.” This is what “success will look like,” the document states:
Serial misinformers and right-wing propagandists inhabiting everything from social media to the highest levels of government will be exposed, discredited.
Internet and social media platforms, like Google and Facebook, will no longer uncritically and without consequence host and enrich fake news sites and propagandists.
Toxic alt-right social media-fueled harassment campaigns that silence dissent and poison our national discourse will be punished and halted.
The super PAC, American Bridge, “will cement itself as the standard-bearer of opposition research, build on its role as a progressive clearinghouse for information that drives the narrative on Republican officeholders and candidates, and be at the epicenter of Democrats’ work to regain power,” the memo states.
“Success will look like” this:
Trump will be defeated either through impeachment or at the ballot box in 2020.
The balance of power will shift back to Democrats. We will measurably impact US Senate, gubernatorial, and state legislative races.
We will free ourselves from solely relying on the press. Our robust digital program will reach voters directly online.
CREW will become “the leading nonpartisan ethics watchdog group in a period of crisis with a president and administration that present possible conflicts of interest and ethical problems on an unprecedented scale,” the memo states.
CREW “will demand ethical conduct from the administration and all parts of government, expose improper influence from powerful interests, and ensure accountability when the administration and others shirk ethical standards, rules, and laws.”
Success will take this form, according to the document:
Trump will be afflicted by a steady flow of damaging information, new revelations, and an inability to avoid conflicts issues.
The Trump administration will be forced to defend illegal conduct in court.
Powerful industries and interest groups will see their influence wane.
Dark money will be a political liability in key states.
The Shareblue website “will take back social media for Democrats,” the memo states. The group will “delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency by emboldening the opposition and empowering the majority of Americans who oppose him.”
Success will be achieved when the following happens:
Shareblue will become the de facto news outlet for opposition leaders and the grassroots.
Trump allies will be forced to step down or change course due to news pushed by Shareblue.
Under pressure from Shareblue, Democrats will take more aggressive positions against Trump.
Shareblue will achieve financial sustainability while diversifying content offerings and platforms.
Top editorial and writing talent will leave competitors to join Shareblue.
Meanwhile, President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday that social media giants Google, Twitter, and Facebook “better be careful” because they “are treading on very, very troubled territory” by favoring left-wing viewpoints.
Earlier that day he tweeted, “This is a very serious situation—will be addressed!”
“Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake New Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD,” he wrote. “Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has indicated he will not testify at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing Sept. 5. on social media and Russian meddling in American elections. Unlike Pichai, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg are expected to testify.
Whether Dorsey and Sandberg will tell the truth is an open question.
19. IS THE DEEP STATE WINNING?
The stakes if it is.
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
By any reasonable standard, the presidency of Donald Trump has so far been a success. After eight years of Barack Obama’s sluggish recovery from the 2008 Great Recession, the economy is “blistering,” as MarketWatchput it, its vigorous growth creating jobs, raising incomes, and lifting the market’s “animal spirits.” Abroad, the “kick me” sign Obama and the progressives hung on America’s back is gone, with allies, rivals, and enemies alike now taking us seriously as the indispensable world power to treat with respect, rather than a daft rich uncle to bully and fleece.
Yet despite all these reasons for feeling good about the country’s getting its mojo back, the current mood is one of crisis and hysteria. We’re consumed by a special counsel’s show trials of marginal Trump associates whose actions had no material impact on the election or the public weal. Appointed to investigate “collusion” with Russia and foreign interference in our election, all that the two-bit Javert Robert Mueller can come up with are paltry financial crimes and duplicitous perjury traps. Consequential developments abroad, such as Turkey’s implosion and a war brewing on Israel’s northern border, are ignored so we can pick over the carcasses of a couple of bottom-feeding swamp-fixers like Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen.
This lack of seriousness and failure to recognize this government’s successes have many reasons. Partly it’s a consequence of just how good we have it. Like most of our political dysfunctions, we are so rich and comfortable that we think we can afford to obsess over payoffs to porn stars and Playboy bunnies, and ignore more important issues. Our attention is hostage to a 24/7 virtual carnival and freak-show on social media, cable news, and the internet. We’re in the third generation of a failed educational system that exists not to teach basic skills, cultural knowledge, and critical reasoning, but to create the new Progressive Man who mouths social justice pieties as he keeps up with the latest fads and fashion. We live in a world of noisy, kinetic distractions, like mice in a maze scurrying to snatch the latest bit of cheese from Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Hollywood.
But this modern version of bread and circuses serves the same purpose it did in ancient Rome: to distract citizens from their lost political power and autonomy. What the last two years have shown is that despite 63 million votes and 304 votes in the Electoral College, despite Trump’s victory won according to the Constitution’s political philosophy and structure, a shadow state is furiously working behind a smog of distraction to reverse that legal expression of the people’s will.
Call it the “deep state” if you want, but the shadow state comprises more than the federal agencies and bureaucracies built by progressivism’s concentration and centralization of power. It includes all those, whether in government or business, patron or client, who find their interests in a technocratic government that “robs selected Peter to pay collective Paul.” Those on the global left by definition prefer centralized power that reduces the autonomy of free citizens, whose principles of self-rule, self-reliance, and accountability interfere with the utopian fantasies of globalist millenarians. The nationalist populism of Donald Trump represents an enemy that threatens to restore power to the citizens and civil societies of distinct nations, alternative authorities that challenge what Thomas Sowell calls the “vision of the anointed.”
No, we do not have to trade in conspiracy theories. The wannabe technicians of our souls, as Stalin called them, don’t need to actively conspire; their harmony of interests spontaneously coordinate actions that all serve the same goal. They don’t need to send each other secret memos or coded messages: they all share the same enemy.
All you need, then, is for someone––The New York Times, CNN, YouTube, Google, Harvard, Goldman Sachs, the DOJ, the DNC––to say “Will no one rid me of this troublesome president?” and the swords will come out. Executive agencies answerable to the president will plot against him with impunity, and ignore the Congressional committees charged with holding them accountable to the sovereign people. “Independent” Pravdas like the Southern Poverty Law Center will draw up lists of proscribed persons and organizations guilty of political crimes disguised as “hate.” Corporations like Facebook, YouTube, Visa, and MasterCard––whose rapacious overlords share the same zip codes, credentials, and cultural tastes as the well-heeled “social justice” progressive elite––will censor the president’s supporters or, as has happened to the Freedom Center, banish them from using their credit cards to solicit donations. Media outlets will make sure the news is dominated by non-stop anti-Trump invective and fake news. Blue-state mayors and city councils will channel John C. Calhoun and nullify federal immigration law to turn loose feral predators on legal citizens as the price for building a permanent base of dependent voters.
All this frenetic activity is directed toward one goal: impeaching the president to stop his rollback of Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of America. Even before Trump took office his sins against decorum and manners––the camouflage of the bipartisan power elite––had led to calls for impeachment should he win. Since then the media and Leviathan deep-state have been working towards that end. The interests of the people, and the success of the country have not mattered; what matters is the recovery of the elites’ power and influence, and the restoration of their role as self-selected gate-keepers of political decency and correct ideology. Since they cannot dissolve the deplorable people and elect another, they will banish their leader.
All this has been clear for two years. What the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel calls “partial justice” has been obvious. As she asks rhetorically, “If there is only ‘one set of rules,’ where is Mr. Mueller’s referral of a case against Hillary for America?”
Federal law requires campaigns to disclose the recipient and purpose of any payments. The Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS to compile a dossier against Mr. Trump, a document that became the basis of the Russia narrative Mr. Mueller now investigates. But the campaign funneled the money to law firm Perkins Coie, which in turn paid Fusion. The campaign falsely described the money as payment for “legal services.” The Democratic National Committee did the same. A Perkins Coie spokesperson has claimed that neither the Clinton campaign nor the DNC was aware that Fusion GPS had been hired to conduct the research, and maybe so. But a lot of lawyers here seemed to have been ignoring a clear statute, presumably with the intent of influencing an election.
Mueller’s writ referred to Russian campaign interference. Then why has it ignored the mountain of evidence implicating Hillary and the Dems, while spending more than a year and millions of dollars to nail small fry like Manafort and Cohen for breaking financial reporting regulations, or debatable violations of campaign contribution laws? Can you blame people for speaking of a “deep state” when its agencies so blatantly strain out the Republican gnat, but swallow whole the Democrat camel?
What makes it look like the deep state is winning is the absence of a national outcry against this egregious behavior, this trashing of the Constitution’s separation of powers and its foundational principle of equality under the law. Congress has struggled might and main to exercise its delegated oversight powers, holding investigations and examining documents, at least those pried loose from the arrogant DOJ and FBI. So far, nothing has yet come of all this labor, obstructed as it has been every step of the way by unelected functionaries. How is it that a Republican controlled government cannot compel federal agencies to respect the authority of the people’s representatives? And we wonder why so many voters speak of RINOs and squishes, of so-called conservatives who have more loyalty to their fellow swamp-creatures than to the people they’re supposed to serve.
What is troublesome is the lack of righteous anger over such blatant and arrogant abuses of power, the righteous anger over “a long train of abuses and usurpations” of the sort that fueled this country’s revolution. Perhaps to most normal people the “collusion” and “impeachment” media farce is mere sound and fury, gratifying the Dems’ revenge fantasies, but signifying another debacle for the pollsters, prognosticators, and consultants who are predicting a “blue wave” in the midterm elections. Perhaps those who support Trump and the renewal of our country will let their votes speak for them come November. Or maybe, just maybe the somnolent Jeff Sessions in October will reveal the results of on-going investigations, followed by indictments, into Hillary Clinton’s sordid catalogue of violations of her office and oath to uphold the Constitution.
One thing is for sure. If this slow-motion coup is not exposed and discredited, then our country will have taken a giant step down the road to rule by corrupt power rather than by the law. Those are the stakes if the deep state wins.
20. VIDEO: ANTIFA PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS
Indoctrinating — and recruiting — in America’s classrooms.
Editor’s note: Below is Sean Fitzgerald’s recent video exposing Antifa radicals in America’s public schools and their efforts to indoctrinate students with their violent ideology. The video was produced in conjunction with the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Stop K-12 Indoctrination campaign. To order the Freedom Center’s new pamphlet, “Leftist Indoctrination in Our K-12 Public Schools,”
21. A world without NATO?
29/08/2018
“Jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam”.
“Jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam”.John Brennan
John Brennan is all over the news, playing the victim for having his security clearance pulled. It’s obvious from his record that he should have never had any access to classified information considering his toxic and radical views.
After Helsinki, Brennan accused President Trump of treason. He’s since doubled down on the accusation.
But if you want to see treason, look at his own past comments. As I discuss in today’s article on Twitter’s censoring of David Horowitz when he tried to discuss Brennan’s record and Islamic anti-Semitism.
After the Helsinki press conference, Brennan claimed that Trump’s remarks were “nothing short of treasonous” and that the president “rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors.’” Meanwhile in ’09, Brennan claimed that Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy Islamic terror group responsible for the brutal murder of numerous Americans had “evolved”.
Brennan insisted that Hezbollah has “lawyers, doctors” who “look at that extremist terrorist core as being something that is anathema”. And that Hezbollah would see America as an “honest broker”. Then he claimed that Hamas was really a social welfare organization that had somehow “developed an extremist and terrorist element”.
This has been Brennan’s consistent message. Next year, he referred to Jerusalem as Al Quds, the colonial name of the Islamic conquerors. And this year, during the Hamas attacks on Israel, Brennan blamed the deaths in Gaza from the Hamas attacks on Israel on the “utter disregard” of “Trump & Netanyahu for Palestinian rights.” Nothing short of treasonous indeed.
Here, from The Nation, is the full text of Brennan’s comments on Hamas and Hezbollah.
MR. BRENNAN: Well, the two cases that you give, Hamas and Hezbollah, are interesting case studies. Hezbollah started out as purely a terrorist organization back in the early ’80s and has evolved significantly over time. And now it has members of parliament, in the cabinet; there are lawyers, doctors, others who are part of the Hezbollah organization.
However, within Hezbollah, there’s still a terrorist core. And hopefully those elements within the Shia community in Lebanon and within Hezbollah at large – they’re going to continue to look at that extremist terrorist core as being something that is anathema to what, in fact, they’re trying to accomplish in terms of their aspirations about being part of the political process in Lebanon. And so, quite frankly, I’m pleased to see that a lot of Hezbollah individuals are in fact renouncing that type of terrorism and violence and are trying to participate in the political process in a very legitimate fashion.
Hamas, on the other hand, started out as a very focused social organization that was providing welfare to Palestinians, primarily in Gaza. Over time, it developed an extremist and terrorist element to it that, I think, has unfortunately delegitimized it in the eyes of many, not just throughout the world, but also in the territories. And its continued embrace of violence and terrorism is something that the Palestinian people, I think, have to continue to tell Hamas leaders that this is not going to bring them what they truly deserve, which is a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel.
The interviewer notes that…
In fact, as I alluded to in my question, Brennan had told me (before taking a job in the Obama administration, but while serving as Obama’s top adviser on intelligence issues) that talking to Hamas and Hezbollah is the right thing to do.
Brennan had accused Trump of treason for talking to the Russians. What do we make of his eagerness to whitewash Hamas and Hezbollah, and talk to them?
25.
Can ISIS regroup? Lessons from interviews with ex-ISIS fighters
09/08/2018
26.
Breaking News from Newsmax.com |
Dear Newsmax Reader,
Guess who first named now “former” FBI agent Peter Strzok as a “Deep State” agent out to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency?His name is Jerome Corsi and he is the author of the most explosive exposé on Washington’s deepest, darkest, most dangerous secrets any of us here at Newsmax have ever read — and we want you to read it, too. So much so, we’re giving it to you for FREE. Why? Because we know you will never, ever read this stuff in The New York Times, or see it on CNN — or even Fox News, for that matter… Here’s the truth… What you’ll uncover in Dr. Jerome Corsi’s new Killing the Deep State will finally answer every question you’ve had about collusion in Washington, including: How far up and how deep inside the chain of command at the FBI, CIA, and DOJ Trump’s enemy resistance really goes. Why Rod Rosenstein is still desperately trying to stop the “other” FBI text messages from ever being released. Who is suggesting President Trump should be . . . well, this will more than surprise you, it will shock you! Corsi reveals who actually started the entire Russian collusion scheme against Trump, who they paid off, and why. Some of these facts were printed earlier this year in his book. They’re only now talking about them on Fox News. Frankly, it’s almost too late. Look… in Dr. Corsi’s latest book Killing the Deep State, the New York Times best-selling author rips the veil of secrecy off the Deep State — America’s shadow government. Even President Trump has a copy of this book. No surprise when he tweeted that a “criminal Deep State” was seeking to stop his presidency — just as Corsi first claimed. The president knows. You must know the truth, too. Listen… we feel so strongly you need to read this, we’re giving it to you for FREE. A book that sells for $30 everywhere else! To get the FREE copy our publisher has personally reserved in your name, take a look below. Hurry, because we can only give away so many copies for FREE… and we want to be sure you’re one of the loyal readers who gets one. Your Friends at Newsmax P.S. One more thing: Be sure to see page 29 in Killing the Deep State for one of Dr. Corsi’s most explosive and terrifying bombshell predictions about the Trump presidency. P.P.S. This book is already a New York Times best-seller despite their all-out effort to keep it off the list. This is a must-read!
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27.
CAN SANCTIONS BRING DOWN THE MULLAHS?
Why Marxist thinking won’t bring down a murderous tyranny.
Michael Ledeen is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center and Freedom Scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
I don’t believe that sanctions are good enough, although, as I have said, the Iranian regime is so hollow it could crash at any time. At my advanced age, I still don’t believe I have seen an oppressive regime fall because life in its land had become unbearable.
Look around the world, and pick your favorite failed dictatorship. My short list runs from Pyongyang to Caracas, via Tehran and Havana. They are all under sanctions. Their people are miserable, and detest the regime. In some places, there are demonstrations, even huge ones. Yet, from North Korea to Venezuela, the regime isn’t headed for the exits. It cracks down. In some places, such as Venezuela and Iran, the people continue to demonstrate and call for regime change. In others, like Cuba and Iran, there is bitter silence. Yet the oppressive regimes impose their will.
In the modern world there are no end of uprisings and attempted revolutions, most all of which fail. The most recent batch constituted the “Arab Spring,” which did indeed produce the downfall of a handful of dictators, but not the democratic revolution so many believed was under way. Now we see wobbly Latin American dictators—Ortega, Maduro—but no revolution. Indeed, in the old Soviet Empire, leaders like Orban are openly advocating anti-liberal and even anti-democratic alternatives to the Western model.
So what does it take to produce serious, successful, viable regime change?
I believe that regime change is a political event caused by political passion, not economic misery. Those of us who studied the French, American and Russian revolutions were taught that the revolutions broke out when the economy was improving. The same may be said for fascism and Naziism
President Trump, along with many pundits and top advisers, seem to have embraced the notion, dear to the hearts of pidgin Marxists everywhere, that a failed economy produces either a change in tyrannical behavior or the downfall of the regime itself. It’s an easy model to adopt, as its popularity amply demonstrates, but it’s clearly wrong. If it were true, North Korea would be in the midst of revolution and/or radical policy change. Which it isn’t. As for Iran, the economy—indeed, the whole regime—is a near-total ruin, and hundreds of thousands of protesters fill the streets, but the regime simply ups the human ante. Under Rouhani, the tempo of (officially acknowledged) executions is up by fifty percent (and the real figure is surely higher).
The ruling class seems not to believe its heavenly blessed domination has ended. There is still an intense internal struggle for the profits and perquisites of power, from kickbacks and payoffs to luxury homes and foreign travel. We will be able to smell their doom when and if it comes; they will defect to the opposition or flee the country. Perhaps that is under way, but it isn’t manifest, as it was when the Soviet nomenklatura bailed out on Gorbachev’s mess. Don’t forget that Gorbachev’s mess was nothing compared to the current Iranian disaster. The ruling elites became convinced that Gorbachev was not up to save Communism, while the Iranian elites still think they can win.
As for the Iranian people, in whose hands the destiny of the Islamic Republic lies, they have long believed that nothing of consequence happens in the world without the connivance of the “real” forces, which in their minds means Russia, the United States, and Great Britain, in the incarnations of the KGB and Putin, the CIA and Trump, MI6 and the Queen. The Iranians generally believe that the Brits and the Russians side with the regime. They are encouraged by Trump, but they are put off by Trump and Pompeo’s denial they are working for regime change. If the Americans are really on the side of the demonstrators, they think, they MUST be for regime change.
The pessimism about Trump was broadly reinforced when he proclaimed his willingness to meet with Rouhani and talk things over. If you’re an Iranian risking your life in the streets, the only thing to discuss is the date of the end of the Islamic Republic. Trump’s openness to talks with the regime is not what they want to hear. They want echoes of their own “death to the dictator” coming from the Oval Office. They haven’t heard that.
It follows that we are not doing all that we should if we want an end to the Iranian tyranny. If we’re going to stick with purely economic measures, we will certainly increase the misery of the Iranian people, but we will not encourage the political passions that are required to bring down a murderous tyranny. And that requires support for the dissidents, better broadcasting, and more aggressive rhetoric. The first step is to talk directly to them, which, so far, we’re not doing.
28.
HOW TRUMP AVERTED AN AMERICAN HEALTH CARE DEBACLE
Democrats’ dangerous love affair with the Cuban healthcare system.
“It would be wrong not to state that in Cuba they have made some good advances in healthcare, they are sending doctors all over the world.…They have made some progress in education.”
But why pick on Democrat Bernie Sanders for swallowing and parroting a hoary disinformation meme concocted by the KGB and DGI (Cuba’s KGB-founded and mentored Directorio General de Inteligencia?)
After all, this classic communist disinformation meme has become a mainstream Democrat/Fake News Media meme.
And, after all, the KGB’s successor (FSB) also employs the Democrats and their publicity arm (the Fake News Media) as eager disseminators of their current propaganda projects (the Steele Dossier.)
But in this column we’ll stick with the KGB-concocted and Democrat/Fake News Media- disseminated “Cuba’s free and fabulous healthcare” dossier.
According to beleaguered Democratic National Committee Chairman Keith Ellison, “The countries like Cuba or Canada or Russia or a lot of places in this world spend half what we spend per capita, and they got better health outcomes than we do.”
And POTUS 39, dictator-loving Democrat Jimmy Carter claimed, “Castro brought superb systems of health care and education to his people.”
“The United States recognizes the progress that (Castro’s) Cuba has made as a nation, its enormous achievements in education and healthcare.” (Pres. Barack Obama March 2016.)
Now over to the Democrat Party’s public relations subsidiaries:
“One of Cuba’s greatest prides is its health care system.” (PBS’ Ray Suarez reporting from Havana.)
“Cuba could serve as ‘a model for health care reform in the United States” (CNN’s Morgan Neil.)
“Castro has brought great healthcare to his country.” (ABC’s Barbara Walters)
Most alarmingly, Democrats seem to believe this KGB/DGI disinformation meme! Back in 2016 Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services signed a healthcare cooperation deal with Castro-regime because: “Cuba has made significant contributions to health and science.”
Or so HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said in her official statement: “This new collaboration is a historic opportunity for two nations to build on each other’s knowledge and experience, and benefit biomedical research and public health at large,” she added.
Tell that to Tuvalu, Ex-President Obama, and Secretary Mathews-Burwell.
You see, amigos: Tuvalu is a group of Pacific islands (big atolls, actually) north of Fiji and east of New Guinea formerly belonging to Britain when they were known as the “Ellice Islands.” Tuvalu is not recognized as a particularly advanced place scientifically-speaking — and yet its natives recently gasped while witnessing the medical practices of a place even more primitive in its medical practices: Cuba.
“Cuba’s contribution to medical education in the region has been welcomed by many Pacific countries,” according to a story at the time from Radio Australia. “But some are finding that doctors who’ve studied in Cuba need extra training when they return home.”
Back in 2008, Tuvalu fell for Castro-regime/United Nations/Fake News Media propaganda mantra about Cuba’s free and fabulous health care and eagerly sent 22 promising Tuvaluan students to medical school in Cuba.
But upon their return with those Cuban “medical degrees”—whoops! Radio Australia explains the problem:
“The (Tuvaluan) government is concerned about their level of practical training … So the Education Department is planning to send the returning (from Cuba) Tuvalu doctors to Kiribati (a nearby primitive island) for a special internship, as the department’s pre-service training officer Atabi Ewekia explains.”
In brief, the incompetence of Cuba-trained doctors is such that they will be essentially “de-programmed” in a medical school where two generations ago medicine were probably the province of witch-doctors with bones through their noses.
And had American voters not swept Donald Trump into office, the U.S. taxpayer would be paying for the Cuban trainers of those Cuban doctors who so desperately needed de-programming to share their “significant contributions to health and science” with U.S. health professionals and researchers.
But perhaps my mention of communist intelligence agencies involved in this meme-spreading strikes some of my amigos as unnecessarily “hyperbolic”—perhaps even a tad “McCarthyite?”
“Have you no sense of decency, Mr. Fontova? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
Objection sustained. Fine. Now let’s have a closer look at this issue: Among the Fake News Media’s “go-to-person” on Cuban healthcare (besides Michael Moore) we find Gail Reed. Indeed, the Huffington Post proudly carries Reed as a contributor and reverentially quoted her on (that mercifully canceled) Obama HHS/Cuba cooperation deal:
“This (the Obama HHS-Cuba deal) is a win-win for Americans and Cubans,” gushed Reed in the HuffPo. “We’re now one step closer to a safer, healthier future for people in both countries.” The HuffPo describes their contributor Gail Reed as: “Founder of Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba, a US non-profit promoting cooperation among the US, Cuban and global health communities, where she is currently Research Director.”
In the way of a brief bio, CNN, another media fan of Gail Reed’s “impartial expertise,” hails their frequent contributor as “a Medical Expert.”
Over at MSNBC, Andrea Mitchell, who often interviews Gail Reed, describes her as: “international director of the nonprofit group Medical Education Cooperation.”
True, perhaps. But for the past 36 years, Havana resident Gail Reed has also been married to an officer of Cuba’s KGB-founded-funded and mentored Directorio General de Inteligencianamed Julian Torres Rizo. The partnership of this future Huffington Post, CNN, NBC and Business Week correspondent with Castro’s secret police began in 1969 when as a member of the (DGI-created) VenceremosBrigades, Reed started visiting Cuba alongside Bill Ayres’ concubine Bernadine Dohrn.
29.
NEW ANNE FRANK PLAY CASTS ICE AS THE NAZIS
Holocaust victim’s legacy is misappropriated by deranged leftists.
A new leftist politics-tainted theatrical production of The Diary of Anne Frank in Los Angeles outrageously compares the Trump administration to the German Nazi regime by replacing Nazis hunting for Jews with ICE agents tracking down Latino illegal aliens.
Although the play is set to open Sept. 6 in Los Angeles, the comparison between Anne Frank and illegal aliens in the United States is beyond farfetched.
Illegal aliens enter the U.S. without permission. They are, legally speaking, the authors of their own misfortune. Nonetheless, efforts to apprehend them are not persecutory, and when they are caught, they are not persecuted. They are treated humanely at all times. They are given a hearing and due process. If they are found to be present unlawfully in the country, they are removed from it, not sent to forced labor camps of death camps.
Apart from trivializing the deaths of six million Jews and many others under Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime, the play treats those who enforce our nation’s immigration laws as monstrous genocidal brutes and absurdly equates the idea of maintaining national borders with violent governmental persecution. It is a theatrical manifestation of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
In the original version of the real-life story, 13-year-old Anne Frank describes her life in her diary after her family hides in an attic in Amsterdam during the 1940-45 Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The Frank family avoids the Nazis from July 1942 to August 1944 when they are eventually discovered by the Gestapo and sent to a death camp that only Anne’s father, Otto, survives.
The new production comes after CNN published an op-in March by Kyung Lah and Alberto Moya titled “Inside a safe house, hiding from ICE.” The writers argued that deporting illegal aliens was somehow similar to the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.
The new interpretation of the play depicts Latino illegals hiding from the supposedly Nazi-like officials of the U.S. Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement (ICE). Prominent Democrat lawmakers have joined forces with the anti-American activists of Antifa to demand that ICE, which does not have a reputation for police brutality, be abolished.
But to anarchists, any notion of laws and national borders is state-sanctioned violence in and of itself.
The real goal is to rid America of immigration law enforcement altogether. Breitbart News reports:
The production, directed by former Roseanne writer Stan Zimmerman and scheduled to run throughout September, “was inspired by the true story of a Jewish woman in Los Angeles who created a ‘Safe House’ for a Latina mother and her two daughters after her husband was deported by ICE.” The play’s characters in the attic will be played by a LatinX cast, according to a promotional website.
“We are not changing the Nazi characters to ICE agents in our upcoming production of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,'” producer Anne Kathryn Parma explained. “This will be a word-for-word presentation of the 1997 Broadway script [of the original play]. We are, however, re-imagining the setting with LatinX families reading the play from their Safe House. This new staging was inspired by the true story of a Jewish woman in Los Angeles.”
And in case you were wondering, Latinxis a politically correct neologism, “a gender-neutral word for people of Latin American descent,” according to Merriam-Webster.
“Latinx purposefully breaks with Spanish’s gendered grammatical tradition. X signifies something unknown and is used in Latinx to connote unspecified gender. A similar use of “x” is in Mx., a gender-neutral title of courtesy that is used in place of gendered titles, such as Mr. and Ms. It has been suggested that the use of “x” in Mx. influenced Latinx.”
Assaults on The Diary of Anne Frank are, unfortunately, nothing new.
As Daniel Greenfield notes, this so-called reimagining of the play “accomplishes the final de-Judaization of Anne Frank leaving the story truly Judenrein.” Judenrein a German Nazi-era word meaning“cleansed [or free] of Jews.”
At the urging of Communist playwright Lillian Hellman, the original Broadway version of the play worked hard to strip Frank of her Jewishness.
Then there is the dubious Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, a business name used by the Anne Frank Center USA Inc. The nonprofit claims that Anne’s father, Otto, “founded our organization as the Anne Frank Foundation,” an assertion disputed by plenty of critics.
Since Donald Trump became president, the Anne Frank Center has become a hotbed of leftist resistance. Instead of respecting Anne Frank’s legacy, the group, led by partisan Democrat hack Steven Goldstein, absurdly calls the victim of Nazi crimes “one of the greatest feminist and social justice leaders in history.”
The Left has been growing increasingly unhinged as its supporters find themselves unable to oust the duly elected 45thpresident of the United States from the White House. As has been the case with every Republican president in recent decades, left-wingers have likened Donald Trump to Hitler and GOPers to Nazis. But the intensity of leftist hatred against Trump seems to outdo the visceral hatred the Left expressed against George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush.
This is just beginning.
Brace yourself for another two or six years of Trump-is-Hitler propaganda.
30.
BARACK OBAMA TO GET PEACE PRIZE PREVIOUSLY RECEIVED BY MURDERESS
Barack Obama can never get enough awards. Here’s one he truly deserves.
Former President Obama has been named a Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope laureate.
The award honors global leaders for “their exceptional work toward a more just and peaceful world.”
Along with Obama, Discovery President and CEO David Zaslav, Humana CEO Bruce Broussard and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) will also receive the Ripple of Hope award, according to a release.
It’s unclear if this is the same thing as the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and they just decided to change it to a sillier name. The Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award was supposed to go to March for Our Lives. Previous recipients of that award included Winnie Mandela.
Stompie Seipei was killed on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s instructions to prevent the Mandela “crisis committee” discovering how badly the Mandela United Football Club had assaulted four youths they had abducted from the Soweto Methodist Manse, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard on Wednesday.
Former club “coach” Jerry Richardson testified that Madikizela-Mandela decided to kill Seipei to cover up what had happened.
The Mandela crisis committee, made up of church, community and ANC leaders, was formed to secure the release of four boys, including Seipei, who were abducted from Methodist minister Paul Verryn’s manse in late December 1988.
“I slaughterd him (Seipei) like a goat,” Richardson said, as Seipei’s mother, Joyce, left the hearing hall in tears.
Truly a peace prize worth throwing over the fence, John Kerry style.
31.
ANTIFA, THE REAL FASCISTS
The assault on Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens is just the beginning.
Foul-mouthed Antifa demonstrators went on a rampage August 6 as they assaulted two high-profile conservative activists at a downtown Philadelphia restaurant for being conservatives and supporters of President Trump.
The attack came the day after Antifa smashed the windows at a U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office in Berkeley, Calif., during a leftist counter-protest of a “No to Marxism” rally. Twenty people were arrested. “Besides the damage to the Marine Corps post, Berkeley police also said ‘an extremist element among a large group’ damaged 21 city vehicles, setting one on fire, and slashed their tires,” Fox News reported.
The incident in Pennsylvania’s biggest city also came after the leftist mayor of Portland, Ore., Ted Wheeler (D), allowed anarchy to break out in his city, instead of cracking down on Antifa troublemaking. For 38 days Wheeler, who is also police commissioner, allowed hundreds of his Antifa allies to unlawfully occupy public property at an Occupy ICE protest site that eventually became a biohazard. “I do not want the @PortlandPolice to be engaged or sucked into a conflict, particularly from a federal agency that I believe is on the wrong track,” he tweeted. “If [ICE is] looking for a bailout from this mayor, they are looking in the wrong place.”
The attack in Philadelphia and other recent violent actions by Antifa are yet another reminder that the totalitarianism-loving domestic terrorists of Antifa, who call themselves anti-fascist activists, are the real fascists in today’s America because, among other things, they use violent tactics pioneered by the real-live fascist storm-troopers of Weimar Germany, the Sturmabteilung (SA). These Antifa goons opposed the Nazis but eagerly copied their tactics, using their fists to shut down political opponents and break up meetings and rallies. Some Antifa today even dress like Nazis, wearing black and red, the anarchist colors which traditionally have also been used by Nazis.
Antifa, which as a group has been warmly embraced by many Democrats, have regained prominence in the post-Obama era by assaulting conservatives and Trump supporters. The hyper-violent anarchists and communists of the Antifa movement are notorious for promiscuously labeling those they target as fascists, Nazis, and racists, in the absence of evidence.
Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and communications director Candace Owens were trying to enjoy breakfast at the Green Eggs Cafe when Antifa thugs surrounded them and became loud and belligerent. Antifa poured a bottle of water on Kirk as police officers, who were not white, tried to protect them.
The restaurant assault resembled a Black Lives Matter action carried out on the weekend of Jan. 3 and 4 in 2015. In it leftists terrorized people as they got together for brunch. “Black Brunch” organizers and their followers stormed upscale eateries in New York City and Oakland, Calif., reading out the names of black criminals killed by the police and shrieking that whites had no right to be there. They accused whites of committing “genocide.”
Kirk and Owens were no doubt targeted because Turning Point USA is becoming a formidable threat to the increasingly violent anti-Trump resistance movement. Turning Point is a six-year-old nonprofit organization whose mission, according to its website, “is to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.”
The group “has embarked on a mission to build the most organized, active, and powerful conservative grassroots activist network on college campuses across the country. With a presence on over 1,300 college campuses and high schools across the country, Turning Point USA is the largest and fastest growing youth organization in America.”
In a bizarre scene right out of Communist China’s Cultural Revolution, young white Antifa agitators blew whistles in the faces of Kirk and Owens, a black woman, while chanting “Fuck white supremacy,” during the restaurant showdown earlier this week. Owens can be seen in a video yelling back at the Antifa activists, “We love the police, we love America, we love the U.S.A.,” as police officers in the City of Brotherly Love tried to separate Owens and Kirk from the protesters.
Soon after the assault, Kirk took to Twitter to denounce the Antifa activists involved.
“If [an] angry conservative mob formed while two young liberals, one white guy and a black woman, were eating breakfast, and the mob hurled horrific insults, threw objects and assaulted them, the left would call it a ‘hate crime’ and every major outlet would be demanding condemnation,” Kirk tweeted.
Interestingly, Antifa activists, like those in Philadelphia who claim America is an irredeemably racist hellhole, are generally young and almost exclusively white.
This fact was not lost on Owens, who referred to Antifa as “an all-white fascist organization” on Twitter, and thanked the police for coming to her aid. “Would like to personally and publicly thank the @PhillyPolice force for keeping us safe today. As you can see in the video, they were all Hispanic and black. The white liberal thugs were shouting ‘no good cops in a racist system[,]’”she tweeted.
Interestingly, at least two left-wingers came to Owens’ defense.
Movie director Samm Hodges stood up for Owens in a Twitter post.
Man, I hate @RealCandaceO’s politics, but watching an (apparently) all-white crowd scream “fuck white supremacy” in her face was sickening. I’m pretty sure that no part of being an ally includes actively oppressing women of color.
Singer Ariana Savalas tweeted:
This is beyond comprehension. What the hell is happening to my party? No matter what you think of @RealCandaceO, even if you hate her, this childish behavior is abhorrent. Fellow liberals, come on. We need to start speaking out more strongly against this bullshit. #NotInMyName
These disturbing incidents caused by radical leftists are becoming increasingly common.
The attackers in Philadelphia seemed to be expanding on the admonition of Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) who earlier this summer urged her supporters to publicly confront and harass members of the Trump administration over the separation of illegal aliens’ children from their parents in immigration detention.
“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that [the] cabinet of [President Trump] in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Kirk blamed Waters for the Monday incident in Philadelphia.
“Why won’t Democrat leaders denounce these ANTIFA thugs?” Kirk tweeted. “This is the new base of the Democrat party. They hate America and will go to violent measures to attack conservatives. This is {Maxine Water’s] America – she called for these sort of attacks.”
Leftists recently hounded Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen into abandoning her dinner at a Washington, D.C. restaurant. Members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) participated in the name-and-shame action and broadcast video footage of it over social media. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was chased out of a restaurant in Lexington, Va., for daring to work for President Trump. Immigration hardliner Stephen Miller was screamed at in the capital city for doing his job and a set of “wanted” posters appeared near his downtown apartment. He famously discarded an $80 box of sushi after a chef heckled him as he left a restaurant (Miller said he feared his food had been spat on).
Presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway was accosted in a supermarket. Former chief strategist Stephen Bannon was harassed while he was quietly minding his own business in a bookstore. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi (R), a strong Trump supporter, was harassed by activists outside a movie screening.
But now Americans far outside President Trump’s inner circle are feeling the wrath of Antifa.
And a backlash is on the way.
32.
SUSAN RICE’S SUDDEN CONCERN OVER US ‘MORAL LEADERSHIP’
Her latest hypocritical tirade against the Trump administration.
Susan Rice, former President Obama’s national security adviser and ambassador to the United Nations, has penned another one of her self-righteous columns for the New York Times. This op-ed is entitled “Trump’s Autocratic Friends.” Ms. Rice accused the Trump administration of abdicating American moral leadership by refusing to criticize “obvious human rights abuses.” The trigger for her tirade was her belief that the Trump administration failed to side adequately with Canada in its dispute with Saudi Arabia regarding Saudi Arabia’s imprisonment of prominent human rights and women’s rights activists. “The president tolerates Saudi abuses instead of defending Canada,” Ms. Rice wrote. “This is the hallmark of the Trump administration’s approach to violations of human rights, particularly when committed by autocratic friends.” The Trump administration, she added, “conveyed to Saudi Arabia and others that they can commit abuses without a word of concern, much less condemnation, from Washington.” She then lumped Israel together with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries in claiming that the Trump administration “has rolled over and played dead while they do whatever they please.”
Sorry Ms. Rice, but you doth protest too much. It was your boss, not President Trump, who rolled over for autocrats in the Middle East while throwing the only real democracy in the Middle East, Israel, under the bus.
Amnesty International criticized Obama’s “public silence on Saudi Arabian human rights” during his trip to the Saudi kingdom in 2014. “There was no open mention of the Saudi crackdown on peaceful political activists, a crackdown that brands anyone who speaks out a criminal and sends them to jail,” Amnesty International wrote. “There was no clear support for religious minority groups who are standing strong for their right to practice religion.” To make sure nobody missed the point, Amnesty International concluded, “President Obama had a real chance to change that in his visit to Saudi Arabia. He failed.”
Does Susan Rice not remember when Obama literally bowed in deference to Saudi King Abdullah as he greeted him at the opening of the G20 meeting in London in April 2009? Has she forgotten Obama’s decision to place the Saudis’ wishes to evade accountability over the demands for justice from 9/11 victims’ families? That is precisely what Obama did when he vetoed a bill that Congress passed unanimously allowing these families to sue Saudi Arabia over alleged links to the 2001 terrorist attacks. Obama protected Saudi Arabia rather than stick up for aggrieved American citizens, despite evidence supporting suspicions of potential links between some of the hijackers and individuals affiliated with the Saudi government. Fortunately, Congress voted overwhelmingly to override Obama’s veto.
President Obama not only literally bowed to Saudi King Abdullah. He metaphorically bowed to the Islamists in his June 2009 Cairo apologia to the Muslim world for the West’s alleged misdeeds. Veteran observer of Islamist hypocrisy, Anne Beyefsky, has called Obama the “apologist-in-chief” for focusing on the United States’ supposed failure to adequately protect Muslims’ human rights instead of holding the Muslim world to account for its own abysmal human rights record.
Obama’s groveling “engagement” with the ruling thugs in Iran led him to turn his back on the millions of Green Movement dissidents protesting in the streets against the fraudulent 2009 re-election of the hardline Islamist conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon, the author of “The Iran Wars,” Obama’s White House told the CIA to “stand down” and not provide support to the Green Movement protesters. Obama also ended programs under which the U.S. would have continued documenting Iranian human rights abuses. Obama did not want anything to interfere with his intention to negotiate what turned out to be his disastrous nuclear deal with the Iranian regime, which included cash windfalls for the mullahs and their henchmen.
Obama also admired Turkey’s authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Obama described the Islamist leader, who unapologetically called Zionism “a crime against humanity,” as “a strong ally and partner in the region and around the world” during a joint news conference in 2013. Obama praised Erdogan’s “reforms” and said “we will support efforts in Turkey to uphold the rule of law and good governance and human rights for all.” When the two leaders met at the Nuclear Security Summit held in South Korea in March of 2012, Obama called Erdogan his “friend and colleague.”
Erdogan’s jails have housed more journalists than any other country in the world, including even Iran and Russia. His government also arrested an American pastor residing in Turkey, Andrew Brunson, in 2016 on suspicions of collaborating with terrorists. The Obama administration stood by while the pastor remained in a Turkish jail without any formal charges filed against him. In contrast to the Obama administration’s decision not to confront Obama’s “friend and colleague,” the Trump administration has acted forcefully against Erdogan’s regime.
“The United States will impose large sanctions on Turkey for their long-time detainment of Pastor Andrew Brunson, a great Christian, family man and wonderful human being,” Trump wrote in a tweet. “He is suffering greatly. This innocent man of faith should be released immediately!” President Trump followed through on his warning.
Susan Rice’s latest tirade is yet another attempt of hers to rewrite the failed legacy of the Obama administration’s foreign policy and to project its moral failings onto the Trump administration. Indeed, the Obama administration was complicit in making excuses for Islamists and enabling them to whitewash their records of serial human rights abuses while piling on against Israel. By deciding to join the dysfunctional UN Human Rights Council in 2009, the Obama administration legitimized the most prominent international platform exploited by the Islamist theocracies and other autocratic regimes to propagate their lies. Susan Rice herself, while serving in her capacity as the U.S. ambassador to the UN, said the Obama administration decided to join the Human Rights Council “because we believe that working from within, we can make the council a more effective forum to promote and protect human rights.” She failed. The Council moved further and further towards becoming the very antithesis of a body truly devoted to protecting human rights.
The Trump administration removed the Human Rights Council’s cloak of hypocrisy and pulled the United States out of this immoral cesspool. “If the Human Rights Council is going to attack countries that uphold human rights and shield countries that abuse human rights, then America should not provide it with any credibility,” Nikki R. Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said in announcing the withdrawal decision. Susan Rice’s reaction to news of the decision was “Retreat. Withdraw. Fail” – a succinct phrase, to be sure, but one that far more aptly belongs on the epitaph for the Obama administration’s failed foreign policy.
33.
THE SPY WHO LOVED FEINSTEIN
During 20 years with the California Democrat, what information did the Chinese spy acquire?
“The leader of the Russia investigation, Dianne Feinstein, had a Chinese spy as her driver for 20 years,” President Trump told an Ohio rally on Saturday, August 4. That was the first time most Americans heard of this spy but the president was not breaking the news.
In “How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies,” a July 27 Politico story, Zach Dorfman wrote, “Former intelligence officials told me that Chinese intelligence once recruited a staff member at a California office of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the source reported back to China about local politics. (A spokesperson for Feinstein said the office doesn’t comment on personnel matters or investigations, but noted that no Feinstein staffer in California has ever had a security clearance.)”
On August 1, San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross wrote a piece headlined “Feinstein had a Chinese spy connection she didn’t know about — her driver.”
A “local source” confirmed that the FBI showed up at Feinstein’s office five years ago with news that her driver was being investigated for spying. Besides driving, the unnamed Chinese spy “also served as gofer in her San Francisco office and as a liaison to the Asian American community, even attending Chinese Consulate functions for the senator.”
According to the source, “the intrigue started years earlier when the staffer took a trip to Asia to visit relatives and was befriended by someone” who was “connected with the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security.” The staffer didn’t even know that he was being recruited and thought it was “some friend.” The FBI “apparently concluded the driver hadn’t revealed anything of substance.” Feinstein was “mortified,” forced the staffer to retire, “and that was the end of it.” And according to the source, “None of her staff ever knew what was going on. They just kept it quiet.”
Plenty to ponder there but for the establishment media the story became Trump “trolling” the senator, and few showed interest in the spy himself. Nothing emerged in 2013 when the FBI showed up at Feinstein’s office, but following the Trump speech details were coming to light.
For some writers, the spy’s profile fit Russell Lowe, listed as Feinstein’s “office director,” and who worked 20 years for the senator. Lowe’s bio for a February 2017 event said he had followed China since Nixon’s visit in 1972, and worked five years with Senator Alan Cranston. In this account Lowe first went to China in 1975, and other visits followed through the early 1990s. Since 1997, Lowe had visited China every year for a month at a time. One report cited a 2007 obituary of Mariam Lew claiming her son Russell Lowe was an engineer, photojournalist, community organizer and staff aide to Feinstein.
In some accounts, Russell Lowe now works at the Education for Social Justice Foundation, whose mission is “to provide education on past injustices relegated to the sidelines of history.” The only injustice on the site is Japan’s sexual enslavement of Asian women before and during World War II. Conveniently escaping notice are the massive atrocities of China’s Communist dictatorship, with casualties in the millions, and the occupation of Tibet since the 1950s.
“Dianne Feinstein was an easy mark for China’s spy,” headlined an article by Paul Sperry, a former media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. As Sperry notes, after Feinstein took on the staffer, the FBI detected that the Chinese government was seeking favors from the senator, who sat on key committees overseeing relations with China. The FBI warned about illegal campaign contributions and Feinstein returned more than $12,000 from donors associated with Clinton crony John Huang.
Even so, China got extension of its favored trade status, Perry writes, “thanks in part to Feinstein.” The wealthy San Francisco Democrat played down China’s human rights violations, equating Tiananmen Square with Kent State. In 1999, Feinstein led efforts to bring China into the World Trade Organization, which “removed the annual congressional review of its human-rights and weapons-proliferation records,” a huge win for the Communist regime.
That regime recruited a spy who enjoyed a 20-year run in Sen. Feinstein’s office. When the FBI caught on to the espionage, they duly warned the senator, but by all appearances no charges were filed and Feinstein staffers “just kept it quiet.” That was supposedly “the end of it” but questions remain.
What information, exactly, did the spy pass on to China? Why did the “mortified” Sen. Feinstein allow the spy to “retire” rather than fire him? Why were no charges filed against an agent of a hostile foreign power? What did Feinstein know and when did she know it? And so on.
An FBI-DOJ investigation could bring some clarity for the people. An official probe, perhaps with a special counsel, would signal that FBI and DOJ bosses no longer collude with powerful Democrats against Republican candidates.
During the administration of POTUS 44, the Comey FBI gave the Trump campaign no warning of foreign meddling. The Comey FBI cleared former First Lady Hillary Clinton of gross negligence with classified information and recommended no charges against the Democrat. The Comey FBI leaked information and used a fake dossier, financed by former Secretary of State Clinton, to place spies in the Trump campaign.
Trump won anyway but under the famous “insurance policy” special counsel Robert Mueller is prosecuting former Trump staffers for activities that took place long before the 2016 campaign.
This ongoing “witch hunt,” as the president calls it, has produced no evidence of collusion with Russia.
34.
THE COORDINATED ‘WAR OF WORDS’ AGAINST TRUMP
The latest surge of fake news from the establishment media axis.
The goal was 100 but at this writing 70 news organizations, including major dailies such as the Miami Herald, Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Denver Post, have agreed to “produce independent opinion pieces about Trump’s attacks on the media.” Leading the campaign is Marjorie Pritchard, deputy editorial page editor of the Boston Globe.
“We are not the enemy of the people,” Pritchard told reporters, and as she tweeted, “This is not about being a Democrat. And this is not about being a Republican. This is about the importance of a free press, enshrined in the Constitution, something we should all get behind.” Even so, readers had cause to wonder if the “coordinated editorial campaign” was something of a non-event.
Coverage of President Trump in the establishment media remains approximately 90 percent negative, so the campaign would hardly signal a new direction. Readers might also wonder about the rallying cry.
President Trump has not tampered with the First Amendment and never said the media was the enemy of the people. He did tweet “It is the FAKE NEWS, which is a large percentage of the media, that is the enemy of the people!” Readers might take the coordinated campaign as another example.
The Washington Post is not an official part of the coordinated effort, but columnist Kathleen Parker charges that Trump has launched a verbal open season on journalists. As the Post noted, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens shared a voice-mail warning, “I don’t carry an AR but once we start shooting you f—ers you aren’t going to pop off like you do now. You’re worthless, the press is the enemy of the United States people and, you know what, rather than me shoot you, I hope a Mexican and, even better yet, I hope a n—– shoots you in the head, dead.” Since this came from an anonymous source, readers could easily believe somebody just made it up.
“The way I view it is, we’re not at war with the administration” explained Washington Post editor Martin Baron. “We’re at work. We’re doing our jobs.” Baron also said “I just look at it as a new administration that we should be covering as aggressively, as energetically as possible. If Hillary Clinton were in the White House, we would be doing the very same thing.” Readers might not think so.
The Washington Post was not very aggressive on the Clinton Foundation, an open-faced bribery scheme that signaled how the Secretary of State would act as president. The best reporting on the Clinton Foundation came from Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash, not the Washington Post, New York Times, or CNN, but the possibilities do not end there.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, the former First Lady violated several statutes involving the handling of classified information and destroyed evidence including some 30,000 emails. Those still exist in some form but the investigative journalists of the establishment media do not pursue them in aggressive style.
If the Boston Globe, Washington Post or New York Times possessed this trove they would likely suppress it. In the old-line establishment media, the truth of a story matters less than whether the facts might validate President Trump. Recall that he called his opponent “Crooked Hillary.”
The 2016 loser travels the world talking about the places in America she “won” but the establishment media hangs on the loser’s every word. The establishment media take seriously the absurd tale that Trump, the 2016 winner, colluded with Russia to steal the election from Hillary, and that James Comey and Robert Mueller are men of great integrity.
For all but the willfully blind, the coordinated editorial campaign has been in place all along, with far more than 100 members. Witness the New York Times, where the erudite William Safire once held forth, hiring a bigot like Sarah Jeong. This bottom-feeder has no record of thoughtful essays, articles or books but for the Times her racist tweets are enough.
The coordinated media campaign ignores the reality that the greatest threat to press freedom comes from Muslim jihadists, who murder journalists for publishing cartoons and hand out death sentences on authors such as Salman Rushdie. Likewise, the far-left thugs now busting up campuses are not big fans of the First Amendment.
Despite the claims of Marjorie Pritchard, the coordinated campaign does confirm that the establishment media is the attack arm of the Democratic Party. The media barrage started during Trump’s days as a candidate, escalated sharply after his 2016 win, and is now surging as never before. Yet, the president’s approval rating continues to rise.
A full 52 percent approve his handling of the economy, 43 percent on immigration, 41 on foreign policy and 41 percent on trade for an overall rating of 45 percent. So look for the president to keep hammering the media. As the coordinated editorial campaign confirms, what some persist in calling the “mainstream media” is really a fathomless sinkhole of fake news.
35.
ERDOGAN’S WARNING TO THE US
What kind of ally and NATO member is Turkey exactly?
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the autocratic Islamist president of Turkey, wrote an op-ed article published on Monday by the New York Times, entitled “Turkey’s View of the Crisis With the U.S.” He complained that the United States does not respect “Turkey’s sovereignty” and “Turkish democracy.” He warned that failure to reverse the “trend” of “unilateral actions against Turkey by the United States” will require Turkey “to start looking for new friends and allies.” The fact is, however, that under Erdogan’s leadership, Turkey had already embarked on its own trend away from being a reliable NATO member and friend of the United States well before its recent disputes with the Trump administration.
Erdogan’s bill of particulars against U.S. policy set forth in his op-ed column included American support for Kurdish forces in Syria. Although the Syrian Kurds have been fighting effectively against ISIS, Erdogan treats them as terrorists more dangerous than ISIS because they are allied with the Kurds in Turkey seeking autonomy. Erdogan objected to what he considered the U.S.’s failure to adequately condemn the failed coup attempt against Erdogan’s government in 2016. He complained about the U.S.’s rejection of Turkey’s requests to turn over the presumed ring-leader of the coup attempt, Fethullah Gulen, who currently resides in Pennsylvania. Finally, Erdogan expressed defiance over the recent sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in response to the Turkish government’s refusal to free Pastor Andrew Brunson, a U.S. citizen.
Erdogan’s complaints are meritless and his warnings are hollow. He has become a tin pot dictator who turned Turkey away from its secular republic institutions towards becoming an Islamist state molded in his image of a revived neo-Ottoman empire. “The Republic of Turkey, just like our previous states that are a continuation of one another, is also a continuation of the Ottomans,” Erdogan said in remarks he made last February during a commemoration ceremony in Istanbul to mark the centenary of the death of Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II. Abdulhamid, Erdogan’s role model, is blamed for the genocide of Armenians in the early 20thcentury.
Ramming through changes in the Turkish constitution intended to concentrate power in the presidency after he became president in 2014, Erdogan has used his expanded powers to eliminate an independent judiciary, imprison dissenters and journalists, and suppress freedom of speech. Erdogan’s government has arrested people residing in Turkey, including minors, for allegedly insulting the ruler. And Erdogan has carried his attempts to suppress free speech beyond Turkey’s borders. His government demanded the prosecution of a popular German comedian for insulting Erdogan under an 1871 German law that makes it illegal to insult a foreign head of state. Chancellor Angela Merkel bowed to Erdogan’s wishes. While the comedian did not end up facing criminal charges, he was forbidden from repeating publicly his supposedly objectionable remarks. In an even more egregious example of Erdogan’s attempts to export his suppression of free speech to the West, Erdogan’s thugs attacked protesters carrying a flag of a Kurdish party outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C. during Erdogan’s visit to meet with President Trump last year.
On the foreign policy front, Erdogan’s government has made claims to territory within the boundaries of Iraq, invaded and bombed northern Syria, and ramped up tensions with Greece over Greek islands in the Aegean that Erdogan believes rightfully belong to Turkey. These actions reflect Erdogan’s desire to re-assert Turkish leadership of Sunni Islam under his vision of a re-created Ottoman empire. He is not only looking east towards the Arab world. He is looking west towards Europe, which he sees succumbing to its growing Muslim population. Alparslan Kavaklıoğlu, who serves under Erdogan as the head of the Turkish parliament’s Security and Intelligence Commission, recently said “Europe will be Muslim. We will be effective there, Allah willing. I am sure of that.” Erdogan himself urged Muslim migrants living in Europe to “[M]ake five children – not just three. For you are the future of Europe.”
While Erdogan is relying on migration and demographics to conquer Europe for Islam, he supports violence against Israel. His mouthpiece, the daily Yeni Şafak, ran an article earlier this year calling for an “army of Islam” to be formed that could conduct a joint Muslim attack on Israel. Erdogan called for the world’s Muslims to take a “physical stance on Israel.” Whipping up a crowd in Istanbul last May in response to the violence at the Israeli-Gaza border and the Trump administration’s decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Erdogan urged that “with the strength of Jerusalem in our feet, let’s march together…let’s come and unify and be together and fight the tyrants with one hand, with one strong fist.”
Erdogan, who supports Hamas, has perversely accused Israel of “state terrorism” for defending its civilians against Palestinian terrorist rocket attacks. And he has compared the Jews of Israel to Nazis. As far back as 1998, when Erdogan was the mayor of Istanbul, he declared that “the Jews have begun to crush the Muslims in Palestine, in the name of Zionism. Today, the image of the Jews is no different than that of the Nazis.” Last month, he said that Israel’s passage of its nation-state law affirming Israel’s Jewish character proved that Israel was “the most Zionist, fascist and racist state” in the world. Erdogan thereby repeated the libel that the Zionist principle of self-determination for the Jewish people in their historic homeland is tantamount to fascism and racism, which even the UN General Assembly repudiated when it repealed a resolution to that effect. “Hitler’s spirit has reemerged among administrators in Israel,” Erdogan added. Ironically, Erdogan had cited Hitler’s assumption of the presidency in Germany as a positive example when defending his own plans for a new presidential system with expanded powers to govern Turkey under his rule. “There are already examples in the world. You can see it when you look at Hitler’s Germany,” Erdogan said before one of his lackeys tried to clarify the comparison.
In any case, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu properly responded to Erdogan’s latest slander against Israel. He observed that Turkey is becoming “a dark dictatorship” under Erdogan’s rule. “Whoever imprisons tens of thousands of his citizens, fires hundreds of thousands, massacres Kurds and occupies both Northern Cyprus and northern Syria should not preach to us about democracy and human rights,” Prime Minister Netanyahu said.
Erdogan ended his New York Times op-ed column with the warning that Turkey would “start looking for new friends and allies” if the United States did not cease its “unilateral” actions against Turkey. However, this would be akin to closing the barn door after the horse had already bolted. Erdogan did not wait to find his “new” friends in Russia and Iran. Indeed, Erdogan has been consorting for some time with the leaders of Russia and Iran over plans to divide the spoils in Syria. Turkey had previously decided to buy billions of dollars’ worth of advanced weapons from Russia, ignoring the disapproval of its NATO partners. Turkey and Iran had already agreed to boost their military cooperation with each other and to increase intelligence sharing. This is all part of Erdogan’s long-held desire for geo-political reasons to tilt his country away from the West. Moreover, as author and historian Dilip Hiro explained in an article appearing on YaleGlobal Online last January, Turkey’s “close ties with Russia and Iran” are driven by “economic interests” involving, among other things, Turkey’s “urgent need of a dependable supply of natural gas.” Turkey’s “main sources of gas are Russia and Iran, contributing respectively 60 and 30 percent of the total.”
With “friends” like Erdogan, who needs enemies? He is a NATO “partner” in name only. It is time to take Erdogan’s hostility to Western democratic values seriously as he builds up his Islamic autocracy and increases his already existing military and economic relationships with Russia and Iran. We must start by promptly removing any nuclear weapons that remain stockpiled in Turkey.
“ΧΑΙΡΕΤΕ“!
“ΕΛΛΗΝΑΣ“
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